Inaccurate string - discouraging search engines does not prevent them from crawling your site.

[carike]

I noticed the following string while reviewing the fuzzy strings for 5.5.
I am not entirely sure where it comes from.

When this setting is in effect, a reminder is shown in the 
At a Glance box of the Dashboard that says, 
“Search engines discouraged,” 
to remind you that your site is not being crawled.

This creates the impression that the site won't be crawled, which is not the case.
We could use something like this instead:

When this setting is in effect, a reminder is shown
in the At a Glance box of the Dashboard that says, 
“Search engines discouraged,” 
to remind you that you have instructed search engines to not crawl your site. 
It is important to note that search engines can (and some do!) 
disobey this directive, although most reputable search engines 
will adhere to the instruction.

I realize that this is longer, we should make sure that we don't misinform people about their risk profiles, or inadvertently spread misinformation.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Just noting this string is from the help text on Reading Settings screen, and was originally introduced in [15000].

[garrett-eclipse]

Initial patch to update verbiage on Help Text.

[garrett-eclipse]

Updated Help Text

[garrett-eclipse]

Before Changes

[garrett-eclipse]

Thanks @carike good point I've uploaded an initial patch in 51274.diff and provided a screen of after and also provided a before for reference.

Prior to the mentioned string there was some existing verbiage as well so I updated the block to incorporate your recommendation.

I did avoid mention of reputation as while crawling nefariously is a thing and definitely frowned upon, there as still valid reasons for crawling sites with this checked such as SEO tools admins use to run reports on their website which is often on a dev install prior to launch.

Below is the verbiage I used;

You can choose whether or not your site will be crawled by robots, ping services, and spiders. If you want those services to ignore your site, click the checkbox next to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” and click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the screen.

Note that even when set to discourage search engines your site is still visible on the web and not all search engines adhere to this directive.

When this setting is in effect, a reminder is shown in the At a Glance box of the Dashboard that says, “Search engines discouraged,” to remind you that you have directed search engines to not crawl your site.

Thoughts/Feedback/Testing always welcome.

[carike]

+1 for the copy :)

[hellofromTonya]

51274 after applying patch

[garrett-eclipse]

Thanks @hellofromTonya for taking the time to test there, I think we're good to go here for committers review.

[SergeyBiryukov]

In 49287:

Help/About: Clarify that discouraging search engines does not prevent them from crawling the site.

Props carike, garrett-eclipse, hellofromTonya.
Fixes #51274.