Thread by @JanAltendorff

Why would a UKgov website want to hide in the darkness?

Since 2011 IPSA has been responsible for paying & publishing MP's expenses. I wanted to find this data but was struggling. I have discovered that IPSA doesn't want us to find them or the data they publish on our behalf.

They have explicitly told search engines NOT to index their pages, so making it difficult for the public to find them or the MP's expenses data.

How do I know?

@ipsaUK #ToryLiars

In the root folder (yes I'm a nerd) of a website is a file called robots.txt, it tells search engines whether and what pages to index. The IPSA one says this

Sitemap: theipsa.org.uk/xml-sitemap/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

i.e. do not index anything. Now why would that be?

@ipsaUK

I checked in Google using

site:theipsa.org.uk it should reveal the number of pages indexed by Google for any site, nothing, Google confirms that they have been instructed not index the site.

You'd think they were trying to hide something right?

@ipsaUK

Oh, the sitemap.xml (usually makes it easy for search engine spiders to crawl a site) named in the robots.txt file throws a "page not found" error.

You'd think they were trying to hide something right?

@ipsaUK

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