Del.icio.us Noindexing… Likely a Bug

There’s some discussion over at Google Blogoscoped about why all of del.icio.us is now requesting not to be indexed, and whether or not it’s on purpose (to keep Googlebot away) or a bug that was accidentally applied to the top-level site.

I’m going with the bug theory.  Why would Yahoo want to keep traffic away?  Sure, it would be an incremental value-add for their own search engine if they index the site and others don’t, but I doubt users are going to dump Google in droves because of del.icio.us.  With del.icio.us being more of a power-user tool, I suspect folks do like I do: click the icon in my firefox toolbar that takes me straight to the site.

I doubt that Yahoo is so short-sighted or arrogant that they would willingly block Google visitors from coming to a Yahoo property.