Hiding personal information from Search engines

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Hiding personal information from Search engines

Keeping private info private in a web directory

James in Vancouver

9:30 pm on Jan 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

We have a directory of people on our webpage and some people are concerned about others being able to do searches on their phone number or name and finding out more info about them on our webpage.

We are considering attempting to help preserve privacy by trying to hide this info from the search engines. My plan on a way of doing it was to insert meaningless tags into the html in the middle of the name/phone number so that rather than:

John Smith 555-5555

It would be:

John Sm<nosearch />ith 555-5<nosearch />555

Will this work? How do most search engines deal with meaningless tags?

There are other things on the same pages I definately want the SE's to see so blocking the whole page is not a good option.

Thanks,
James

bcolflesh

9:37 pm on Jan 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

Put the personal info in an image file.

James in Vancouver

9:50 pm on Jan 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

That is not possible.

There are literally hundreds of people in the directory and it changes quite often.

bcolflesh

9:54 pm on Jan 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

If you are using PHP and have GD installed, it's cake - I take it these are static HTML though - you could try the various javascript text encoders, ex:

hiveware.com/enkoder_form.php

Ransak

9:56 pm on Jan 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hi,

Sorry to answer a question with a question, but would using a PHP type [include] work? You could do something like:

<body>
[include directory]
</body>

for the page you want to be indexed, I think spiders or bots will only read that page and won't see the directory itself. When a web browser asks for the page, the [included] part will be added.

I'm not 100% sure if this works or not but it came to mind.

Frank Vollono

James in Vancouver

10:01 pm on Jan 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

The directory actually is a mysql database and it is served up using php.

So adding the <nosearch /> tags would be trivial. I really want to know if it would work or not.

I'm not sure if I have GD installed or not. I would much prefer to just add the <nosearch /> tag if that would work.

I would think that using GD would impose a more serious load on my server. (These pages are accessed quite frequently)

Ransak,
Search engines definately see the included file when you do an include.

Krapulator

5:11 am on Jan 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

I doubt this would work. I expect that search engines would simply ignore tags that they do not recognise just like an old browser would.

I would use javascript to write them to the page - this really would not involve a great deal more work than doing what you were suggesting.

Otherwise, why not use robot.txt and robots meta tags to keep the robots away (well the good ones anyway).

James in Vancouver

12:37 am on Jan 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

For the information of those who are curious, it appears to work the way I was hoping for google anyways.

I have broken up my own last name where I post it in the footer of the pages of some of the pages on my personal website. If you search for my name you no longer find any of the pages that have this change reflected in the google cache. (some pages that have not been updated in the google cache, and others that I didn't change still come up).

However if I search for the name with a space where the <nosearch /> tag is inserted it will be returned. Using the example above if I search for "John Sm ith" I would get the name. I think this is a pretty effective way of protecting peoples privacy, without making it more difficult for website readers.

It makes sense that google would treat an unknown tag like a whitespace as treating tags like white space is a lot safer than concating the words on either side of the unkown tag.

James