On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 7:23 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
When the Italians did their blackout, Google asked us to block them (!) from bits.wm.o (our JS/CSS domain), which in the specific case of the Italian blackout had the effect of not honoring the blackout at all.
I'm guessing we'd probably have to block search engines from enwiki entirely to avoid the blackout screwing things up, yeah.
It seems Google has advised to serve a 503 (Service unavailable) HTTP code during blackouts to avoid them influencing their search engine.