In the first few days of Obama being in power, the Whitehouse.gov website has opened itself up to the search engines!
According to the BBC website, the Whitehouse.gov robots.txt file under the Bush administration had almost 2377 lines, and on day 1 of Obama taking power, this has been reduced to just 2 lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/
The only content now being blocked is the includes files, which search engines really don’t need to be seeing anyway.
It’s also interesting that the site has now launched a blog http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/ – which is another way for the new US Government to connect with its people and continues in the spirit of openness which seems to be the order of the day in the new regime.
Hopefully none of the robots.txt items that were in place before were being used to prevent duplicate content – if so some of these rules may need replacing to ensure that the site doesn’t get penalised.
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