Ryanair disallowing all robots? :O

As my buddy Gabriele notices here (here more tweets about it), Ryanair blocked (tried to) all access from all crawlers (hence, all search engines) to their site. This happened:

  • recently, since Webarchive shows that robots.txt was different back in Jan
  • voluntarily, because it’s across all of their site, including the main one

Some SEOs are maintaining it’s to reduce their visibility in order to have less accesses=less refunds due to the pandemic. I can’t really believe they’d be that stupid. Maybe’s got to do with paid results, which’d be more likely. They were hacked? That’s anv exceedingly elegant ruse though.

Or simply put, their SEO was fired abruptly and decided to leave behind a little present.

Interesting though 🙂