How NOT to be seen.

What if you don't want search engines to find you?

[Hutch]

Strange question?

Is there any way to make search engines ignore your web site? I need to make up an unsecure site that's available on the web but I'd rather the search engines ignore it so we don't get a slew of freeloaders looking for that fast buck. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Thanks.
Hutch

[LifeinAsia]

There are a number of ways:
- robots.txt
- <meta name="Robots" content="NOINDEX"> on every page
- block user agents with .htaccess

Either of the first 2 should block most well-behaved bots. The 3rd will require updates as you find more bots to block.

[Hutch]

Thanks for the help :)

Hutch

[g1smd]

The robots.txt disallow stops bots spidering the site but will still allow URLs from your site to be listed in the SERPs. These will be listed as URL-only entries if anyone ever links to those URLs from some other place.

The meta noindex tag will prevent even the URLs from being listed in the SERPs, but bots will need to access those pages in order to actually see the meta tag.