Trombone chat not on Google

[DRTrombone]

Hi,

Just an observation, I tried to get to trombone chat today by searching on Google, and it wasn’t on there.

I wonder if there’s some sort of cloudflare setting or similar that is turned on that prevents bots from crawling the site, therefore Google has delisted it?

I suspect if trombone chat isn’t listed on the major search engines, then the flow of new users will slow down quite a bit.

Kind regards,
Dave

[AndrewMeronek]

Trombonechat does show up on Bing.

[KWL]

Cutting off the Ai scrapers that were bogging down the site also cuts off Google. I wonder if there is a way to create a white list allowing approved search engines in.

[ghmerrill]

My experience is that if you search for "TromboneChat" (no space), you don't seem to find a direct (URL) reference to it. But there are a lot of links returned that refer to TromboneChat indirectly.

If you search for "Trombone Chat" (space between the words), as part of what is returned you get an "AI Overview" that describes it and refers to "TromboneChat.com" -- though without displaying that as a clickable link.

I'm not really sure how important this is since in any event it only takes a couple of different searches to find the site.

[Oslide]

I don't know how related this is, but searching for TC posts with Google using
"searchterm site:trombonechat.com" does not work.

[JohnL]

Both internal and external search functions seem to be having problems.
viewtopic.php?t=42353
viewtopic.php?t=43284

[DRTrombone]

I’ve had a poke around on the cloudflare docs, and it looks like you can block/allow certain bots and bot types. It also looks like you can make certain bots pay if they want to scrape the site (an interesting potential revenue stream for the site!)

So I suspect by just adjusting the settings in cloudflare, this can all be sorted out

[brassmedic]

Trombonechat does show up on Bing.

Then nobody will ever see it.