from Hacker News

Instructions around the usage of meta robot tags and robots.txt files

by volgo on 4/14/21, 2:42 PM with 29 comments

• by mimsee on 4/14/21, 5:56 PM

  Why are they banning the methods instead of saying how the pricing should be displayed. E.g. why say you cannot have "noindex" instead of saying "the pricing information needs to be in plain-text, human-readable, accessible, indexable..." and so on.

• by rbinv on 4/14/21, 5:39 PM

  Nice. They should probably add HTTP headers (X-Robots-Tag) to the list. Cloaking, too.

• by InfiniteRand on 4/15/21, 1:28 PM

  As I read this, it seems like this is saying that if you are saying that you are posting public pricing information, you should not be hiding that information from search engines.

  Seems like it's trying to avoid people (I guess it's targeted toward insurers, if I'm reading the main page correctly) saying that they are transparent about prices but hiding the information so no one sees it.

  Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

• by cosmotic on 4/14/21, 7:36 PM

  They should retroactively penalize hospitals for trying to hide this information as it is clearly against the spirit of the law.

• by kjrose on 4/14/21, 11:01 PM

  This will be a fun example of legalism v. Hacker ingenuity. Everytime they figure out a specific legal way to write up a trick to hide prices, the folks will find another loophole to hide them.

  Honestly. This could be a fun race to the bottom.

• by ninetax on 4/14/21, 6:10 PM

  Typo in headline?

• by MattGaiser on 4/14/21, 5:39 PM

  At least they are keeping up with current technical tricks.