%%excerpt%% Reddit has commenced its assault on search engines, blocking those that don’t have a commercial relationship with the company, like Google.
They’re likely blocking user agents too, which I think also doesn’t have legal enforcement (as in DuckDuckGo can just use “Google” unless they said otherwise.
LinkedIn tried blocking scraping that way but as long as the scraping isn’t burdensome it’s basically legal but you can still be bound by TOS and civil claims
this is just going to cause indexers to ignore robots.txt
“We always obey the robots.txt”
They’re likely blocking user agents too, which I think also doesn’t have legal enforcement (as in DuckDuckGo can just use “Google” unless they said otherwise.
LinkedIn tried blocking scraping that way but as long as the scraping isn’t burdensome it’s basically legal but you can still be bound by TOS and civil claims
https://natlawreview.com/article/hiq-and-linkedin-reach-proposed-settlement-landmark-scraping-case
Rate limiting could “fix” that unfortunately.