New "Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers"

Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers are defined in RFC-5785

[Andova Begarin]

Once, Bing and Google would find, for the search string ".well-known" webpages that had references to the string ".well-known". Which many WebmasterWorld users had seen references to in their log files.

GoogleBot started doing these:

GET /.well-known/apple-app-site-association
GET /apple-app-site-association

And many people were wondering what was up with that...

RFC-5785 explains them as "Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers" and how to implement them and why.

After testing, I have found that this works for GoogleBot:

Disallow: /.well-known/
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association/

As an aside, as a test, I added

/.well-known/

to the end of some popular CMS sites, like Joomla, to see what they would do. Joomla served up a (very large) "Page not found" page - obviously Joomla's entire code base loaded and ran only to then find out the request did not exist. (That is a fault of many CMS programs.)

My point being that Web Developers really need to detect some obviously never-will-exist requests *before they load their entire code base* (which are usually tens of megabytes of PHP/Perl code).

But I digress...

(Joomla now detects and (properly) ignores

/.well-known/

.)

[Andova Begarin]

Ugh! I need to edit that post. Is there an edit post feature? I can't seem to find one. (No need to reply as this is a comment to self...)

[Andova Begarin]

P.S. If everybody already knows about this, my apologies for dumb post.

Last month, when I saw ".well-known/" requests by Google I searched for, duh, ".well-known" in Bing and Google. Both returned links to several sites with people asking "I'm seeing requests for '.well-known' in my logs! What it this?"

(Which is why I posted this, albiet probably much too late.)

But now, though, searching for ".well-known" on Bing and Google BOTH TRANSLATES the request to "well known" -- even +".well-known" does not work.

So, Never Mind.

[keyplyr]

Not sure what you're asking or reporting, but .well-known should be a hidden directory.

[Andova Begarin]

Sometimes I am not clear in my words. (I'm like apologizing like all the time for that...)

Here is a link describing this: [gaj.design...]

Quite right, a leading "." is a hidden file/directory for *nix, that does not mean that having such a name in a request will not look for and find it if it exists, and cause a server/website to issue a 404 if not. Again, look to RFC-5785 for more information.

When Bing and Google returned searches for ".well-known" many were from Server Fault, Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Apple Developer and even Google Products Forum of the "What are these and should I be worried?" nature.

Well, time passed as this no longer seems a concern to anyone.