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fix: keep crawlers off the badge builder and badges - #18

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NotAFlightRisk merged 1 commit into
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fix/crawl-badge-builder
Nov 12, 2026
Merged

NotAFlightRisk merged 1 commit into
mainfrom
fix/crawl-badge-builder

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Bugfix (sort of - nothing's broken, it's just wasted requests)

Overview

Crawlers follow the "Customise it in the badge builder" link on every profile and repo page, so they walk one builder URL per account and pull every badge along the way. In a 20-odd minute slice of the logs that was 40% of all requests, nearly all from Google, Ahrefs and Claude's bots, which all read robots.txt. So the builder's query-string URLs and the badge and shields endpoints are disallowed now, and the link gets rel="nofollow".

The plain builder page, the listings and the profiles stay crawlable. README badges are fetched by GitHub's image proxy and Shields, and neither looks at robots.txt, so they keep working. Google won't get the badge image when it renders a page any more, which I don't think matters for a 20px picture.

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@github-actions github-actions Bot added the bug Something isn't working label Nov 12, 2026
@NotAFlightRisk
NotAFlightRisk merged commit 1a7fb33 into main Nov 12, 2026
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@NotAFlightRisk
NotAFlightRisk deleted the fix/crawl-badge-builder branch November 12, 2026 20:10
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