discuss: Which Licenses Should LDP Recommend? GFDL
Subject:
Re: Which Licenses Should LDP Recommend? GFDL
From:
Henry Kingman ####@####.####
Date:
26 Apr 2001 17:23:37 -0000
Message-Id: <20010426102335.A23813@shell21.ba.best.com>
On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 11:58:45PM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:
> The problem is that a lot of people use search engines which are most
> likely to get hits on commercial sites instead of LDP sites. This is
> due to promotion. Some search engines can be even be paid to give a
> high priority to a site. Listing a lot of keywords, etc. helps.
> Thus a lot of people may get to a site with ads. The license could
> prevent this. I think most volunteer authors don't want ads put into
> their work. Now if it's just a modest link to a sponsor, it's not so
> bad.
On ZDNet's LDP mirror, I see almost no referrals at all from search
engines. Our mirror operated for years, even before my boss made me
put ads on it, and it does show up on search results pages... but
pretty far from the top still.
One problem is that LDP content is starting to badly
pollute search results, especially for the google.com/linux search.
Query any vaguely Linux-ish word and you get five pages of results,
all to the same LDP page over and over again.
Has the LDP ever considered including a simple robots.txt file as
part of the mirror? I'll bet most mirror sites would be glad to
save the bandwidth charges, as those bots really load your pipe
as well as your server when they get in there, at very little
benefit to your traffic as far as I can tell.
Sorry for the off-topic, non-license-related suggestion.
Well, but maybe part of the license could be that only a few
well-placed, daily-updated sites would be given permission to
change the "no robots" stuff, I don't know (which would also
help with the staleness factor).
-Henry
