You can’t always be right
July 17, 2008 – 1:24 amYesterday I wrote a post boasting about how many votes were cast on the new rating system. While the post was technically accurate, a large amount of those votes were actually made by the googlebot. During the excitement of setting up the rating system, I forgot to block the voting script page (in the robots.txt file) from the googlebot; meaning it traversed the links and that counted as a vote. Hope this helps to provide some useful information for those considering implemented ranking systems. I’ll file this into the lessons learned archive.
Note: I stumbled onto this by accident while reviewing access logs from the site.
