jdMorgan - 3:54 pm on Jul 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

No, I can't, but it's a violation of the protocol and I don't recommend risking your site's ranking and "technical quality score" on a method that violates the fundamental protocol of the Web.

You may want to keep an eye on your raw server access log and look for the occasional requests for relative URLs that result from the user-agents which are not able to resolve relative Location paths. I recall that several mobile user-agents have this problem, but I don't recall their names.

The big advantage of 'going by the book' on the various protocols (e.g. HTTP) and standards (e.g. robots.txt) is that if and when a major search engine 'bot breaks the rules, you can point to the problem and say, "That is undeniably a bug on your end." Plus, you won't get thrown out of the search results over some 'minor' problem that the search engines used to have a work-around for, but later removed that work-around (or unintentionally broke it) while tweaking something else; We Webmasters don't have access to the search engines' back-end code, so sticking to the standards is our best bet to avoid potentially-fatal search ranking problems.

As someone posted in a thread here about duplicate content, "Get it right or perish." That's the best title I've ever seen here at WebmasterWorld so far.

Jim