Hide page from spiders

... for an html newby

[JonnyWales]

I've looked in Search but cannot find exactly what I'm looking for.

All I want to do is have 2-3 pages which will not have links from the main part of the site, ie. visitors will only reach them by clicking on a special offer link in an email message. So I don't want these 2-3 pages to get spidered and subsequently appear in an index.

How do I do this?

[korkus2000]

You should put these files in a directory and make it robots excluded in your robots.txt.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

[JonnyWales]

Thanks for that. One small supplementary :-

If I wish to exclude the spiders from seeing a page which also resides in the root along with index.htm which is the correct syntax?

User-agent: *
Disallow: page_to_hide.htm

OR

User-agent: *
Disallow: /page_to_hide.htm

[g1smd]

If I don't want spiders to index one or two particular HTML pages, then I add this meta tag only to those pages:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

You might want nofollow in place of follow if you also do not want the spiders to follow any links on those pages.