I did forget about one advantage to letting them roam: inbound links. Every inbound link increases our importance to Google. But yesterday this lowbrow site linked to an iotd blog view, and it really hit the bandwidth hard. Over 7000 views of that page alone.

I should investigate putting some sort of advertising on the blog view to try to recover for the loss of bandwidth for something that won't do us any good any other way. Otherwise, if this keeps up, I may have to shut the blog view down.

Y'know, there IS a way to hide the Cellar from Google using some proper coding or whatever... dunno what it is, though. :greenface

robots.txt, nothing too complex. I'm not sure about more complex stuff like making it not pick up links we post and things like that though but I'm sure it's webserver level stuff.

I don't want to hide it from Google! Unless things get way out of hand.

From what I've seen, not having a robots.txt file would prevent search engines from picking up anything.

No, not having a robots.txt file means they can do what they want, follow every link etc.

But will any results be posted?