who sees the legal stuff?

[lucy24]

Posting this here rather than in Apache because I'm not asking "How to" but "Whether to":

If you've got a page with legal/copyright type information, is it a good idea to make this page visible to everyone including nasty robots that you'd normally lock out? (Same principle as robots.txt: let 'em see the rules so they have no excuse for not obeying them.)

Vague instinct says yes.

[tangor]

Simple:

Yes.

More interested in why a copyright statement would be a question of should I allow or not? Should be up there with robots.txt...

[enigma1]

I wouldn't want to expose thin content to spiders at all that includes copyright, privacy, terms of use etc. they're usually not related with the main pages at all. And since they're useful only to humans they could be exposed only if a cookie is setup or some similar method that verifies human presence.

[Marketing Guy]

Could be considered to be a indicator of quality to search engines - copyright, privacy, about us pages, etc. Same basic principle as standardising name, address and phone number across local search citation sources.

Wouldn't worry about thin content for a couple of (fairly important and commmonplace) pages.