Dennis Budd wrote: > But LSTOWN is a public archive. I've never been asked for my > subscription when I've accessed it via the web. So that can't be the > difference. > > It would make sense that Google's bots can access public archives, but > not private archives, but this is no evidence for that. The access rights on the list archives are not the only factor in determining whether Google's bots can access the archives of that list. Approximately 100 of our more than 14,500 lists have publicly-accessible archives, however, I think you will be hard-pressed to find direct links to any of them in Google search results, because we have the following directives in a robots.txt file in the web server document root directory on the LISTSERV server: User-agent: * Disallow: / As long as the Google bots obey these directives, Google search results should not contain direct links to any of our list archives, though they may contain other pages which contain links to list archives on our server. -- Paul Russell Senior Systems Administrator OIT Messaging Services Team University of Notre Dame