Not being found by the search engines

noindex,nofollow

[gtate]

I have a website I do not want to be found by the search engines. I therefore inserted thge code "<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">" into my templated pages, but find it is still being picked up. Can anyone help!

[Brett_Tabke]

use a robots.txt instead.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

[gtate]

Many thanks :-)

[g1smd]

>> It is still being found by the search engines <<

What do you mean by "found" here?

I assume you mean that they are spidering the site.

However, I assume that you don't want to be listed in the SERPs. That is a completely different matter altogether.

If that is the case, the meta tag is the correct thing to use - as then those pages will never appear in the SERPs.

If, however, you use the robots.txt protocol to exclude spidering then no pages of the site will be spidered, but pages from your site can still appear in the SERPs as URL-only entries if someone on an external site links to some pages on your site. Your pages will not be spidered, but the link to your pages is enough to ensure Google will record that the URL exists and it therefore lists the URL (and only the URL) in the SERPs.

Yahoo goes one better for some URLs excluded by robots.txt - if someone links to that URL they don't just show it as a URL-only entry in the SERPs, they instead construct a title for that entry using the anchor text of one of the incoming links instead.