Google sent me this nice email at work:

Greetings,

Google is currently blocked from crawling your site by the robots.txt file that your server uses to control access by search engines. As a result, users who are looking for your site are not able to find it using Google. As you know, a large fraction of internet users use Google as their starting point and over 50% of search engines referrals come from Google. Google’s mission is to deliver the best search experience on the Internet by making the world’s information universally accessible and useful. We would like to include your site at http://www.ussaonline.org in Google’s index to make it easier for your users or customers to find your site.

To allow Google to crawl your site, add the following lines to the robots.txt file:

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Once you have allowed Google to access your site it can take between 4-6 weeks for your site to appear in our index. For additional information on getting your site included in our index, please see: http://www.google.com/webmasters/.

Regards,

Raina

**********************

Raina Rathi
Google, Inc.
Business Development
[removed contact info]

If you do not wish to be contacted regarding inclusion in the Google index again, please send us an email so that we can remove you from our mailing list.

It’s the first time I’ve gotten an email like this from a search engine. Don’t they think that the robot.txt is blocking search engines for a reason? In this case, the site is a learning/classroom portal. There’s nothing there unless you’re a student with an account. I thought this email was a little silly but nice of them none the less. It’s nice to know google wants you. Consequently, if they want to index something, they should try indexing the main school site, United States Sports Academy.