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stop blocking petitions on the https://petitions.whitehouse.gov website from being indexed in search engine results.

Created by T.R. on June 24, 2013

The website https://petitions.whitehouse.gov has through its robots.txt file intentionally blocked the petition pages from being indexable on search engines such as Google and Bing. This means the site is keeping information about petitions from being readily findable for people searching on the internet. This inherently conflicts with the core mission of what the petition subdomain of whitehouse.gov is designed to do! Allow people to find the petitions through online search, engage with the site and the process, and let democracy happen.

The fix is very simple: the webmasters for petitions.whitehouse.gov simply need to make an update on the robots.txt file to stop blocking this directory:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/

And voila! The petitions will becoming indexed.

Government & Regulatory Reform
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