You don't want Google to find your site? - 2007-01-18 21:33
Most people have been trying to figure out ways to get Google to rank their site higher so that more people come and visit. But have you ever wanted Google to not find information on your site? It’s not a common issue (why would you put something up on the internet if you didn’t want someone to find it?) but it does happen. For instance, I’m designing my church’s website and we support missionaries around the world. There are certain people who are in countries where it may not be safe for them to be known as missionaries.
So, we need to show their name because we support them, but we don’t want people to be able to search for them. There were a few options that I could think of:
1. Make each person’s name an image so that there was no text to be searched. This was a good possibility, but then you run into each browser rendering the images the same, but the text on the screen differently, so it would look a bit awkward.
2. We could spell the people’s names incorrectly. For instance, instead of Brian Zollinhofer, I could change it to Brîan Zøllînhøfer. That way a search for “Brian Zollinhofer” wouldn’t bring up this particular site. Tricky, but still not optimal.
3. Use an encoder so that search engines can’t find it. I didn’t really know if there was anything to do this, but there is. I found a mailto encoder that does any amount of html you want, not just mailto. It works remarkably well. There are 3 different options for encoding (and I got the “double-escaped” method to work great for the site I was on. Now when I Google the individual’s name, my church’s site doesn’t bring their names up! Beautiful. All you have to do is copy and paste the code that the mailto encoder site generates onto your page. Easy as pie.
Or you could use what most major sites use. The robot.txt which is standard among all search engines. You can tell the robots & spiders to not crawl certain parts of your site. You can find more info here: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html
Oh sure, just simplify my convoluted way of solving problems. Why didn’t you tell me that earlier… I guess I’ll have to look into that method now…