Question: How do I keep my web site (or a specific page) from showing up in search engines?
Posted: January 29, 2009 » by Lead Architect » in SEO; Tips and Support
Usually our goal is to increase the likelihood that your pages will appear in search engines, but there are cases where you might not want a page indexed or easily found by a simple Google or Yahoo search. You might want to restrict a page or part of your web site only to customers or keep the prying eyes of the competition at bay.
The best way to keep a page or set of pages out of the search engine index is through password protection. Web crawler scripts will be able to see that the page is there, but will not be able to see the content. If password protection is not practical, you can place a “no index” meta tag within a singular page to tell scripts to exclude it from search results. You can also create a “robots” text file to restrict indexing of multiple pages or an entire site.
If a page already appears in search results, these techniques can alter future results when search engines do their reindexing. If you can’t wait until the next reindex, Google and Yahoo both offer a manual removal request option that takes approximately 3-5 days to complete. Once the page is removed, you’ll need to use one of the methods above to react when a search engine is ready to rerun their crawlers.
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