I was wrong about robots.txt

Summary

Recently, I wrote an article about my journey in learning about robots.txt and its implications on the data rights in regards to what I write in my blog. I was confident that I wanted to ban all the crawlers from my website. Turned out there was an unintended consequence that I did not account for.My LinkedIn posts became broken#Ever since I changed my robots.txt file, I started seeing that my LinkedIn posts no longer had the preview of the article available. I was not sure what the issue was initially, since before then it used to work just fine. In addition to that, I have noticed that LinkedIn’s algorithm has started serving my posts to fewer and fewer connections. I was a bit confused by the issue, thinking that it might have been a temporary problem. But over the next two weeks the missing post previews did not appear.This is what my LinkedIn posts used to look like: no link preview and little engagement with the postAfter doing a quick search, I found a tool called LinkedIn Post Inspector. This tool can show everything that you would want to know about links that you are about to share on the platform. I plugged in my recent article in the tool and it revealed to me the reason why I could no longer see the previews - the robots.txt file had a directive that would not allow LinkedIn bot to scrape the web pages. This was the error message that I got:Fair enough! Thinking of it now - it makes so much sense! I should have seen that ahead of time. Whenever you want to post something on LinkedIn or other social media platform, they would need to request the page the link of which you are about to share. These bots need that page in order to get access to the meta tags necessary to create the preview. Those are known as Open Graph meta tags. And it all comes from Open Graph Protocol, which was originally created at Facebook.Open Graph Protocol#According to the OPG website,The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For inst...