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