HomeAway's iCAL URLs don't work in Google Calendar
Dear HomeAway customer support:
When I visit
https://www.homeaway.com/owners/index.cfm?fuseaction=availability&pro_id=3020695
and click the [Google Calendar] link at the bottom of the screen, I am offered this link to cut-n-paste:
https://connect.homeaway.com/icalendar/hacalendar.htm?cid=89d5c6d06a2649c1978a09d450235777
When I use Google Calendar, click the [Add] link, and paste in the above URL, I receive the error:
Could not fetch the url because robots.txt prevents us from crawling the url.
This is due to the following text in http://connect.homeaway.com/robots.txt :
User-agent: * #Disallow: /search/refined/ User-agent: wegobot Disallow: /
Google is interpreting this as:
User-agent: * User-agent: wegobot Disallow: /
Which Google thinks means DON'T INDEX YOUR SITE AT ALL!!!!!
The fix is to either remove
User-agent: * #Disallow: /search/refined/
or move it to the end of the file, where it will not be mis-interpreted.
How about giving me an extra year for taking the time to diagnose, and inform you of this SERIOUS issue with Google, the most used search portal on the internet!!!
- ross's blog
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