Listen… @cynicallyindecisive - Tumblr Blog

BARBIE (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig

#do I need a reason #to show my face?#me #no?#great #I’m back though 💕

oh my god. they changed the "hide my blog from search results" setting to "discourage searching of my blog". ie it's no longer possible to stop google & co from indexing your blog.

this feels like the kind of change tumblr should give a heads up about rather than silently make. if you have a blog, google is indexing it now. there is no way to stop google from indexing your blog now. regardless of previous settings, your blog is now being indexed by search engines. you can't turn this off.

astraltrickster

This isn't something new tumblr just fucked up; this is, unfortunately, just being more honest about what the setting does.

"Do not index" requests can, legally, just be ignored. Google typically respects them as far as I'm aware, but other search engines and services might not. This is the way it's been all along.

Does it suck? Yes. Is it tumblr's fault? No. What can you do about it? Far as i can tell the best thing you can do is just know what the deal is and push for laws to make privacy flags legally binding.

eregyrn-falls

The @changes blog posted about this today:

"We’ve updated the text for the blog setting that said it would “hide your blog from search results”. Unfortunately, we’ve never been able to guarantee hiding content from search crawlers, unless they play nice with the standard prevention measures of robots.txt and noindex. With this in mind, we’ve changed the text of that setting to be more accurate, insofar as we discourage them, but cannot prevent search indexing. If you want to completely isolate your blog from the outside internet and require only logged in folks to see your blog, then that’s the separate “Hide [blog] from people without an account” setting, which does prevent search engines from indexing your blog."