5:30 Design Tip

There are two ways that you can tell a search engine not to crawl your site.

The first is a meta tag on your homepage.

The second is a robots.txt file.

The meta tag is simple. As you are writing your page just add the tag:

<meta name="robots” content="none">

This tells bots not to follow links or index your site.

In the content attribute you can use follow or nofollow and index or noindex. The follow or nofollow tells the bots what to do with the links. The index or noindex tells the bots if they should remember the page.

You should also utilize a robots.txt file. Not all bots will pay attention to the meta tag. Google, for instance, does not. This file needs to go in the root directory of your Web site. You should find it if you go to http://www.mysite.com/robots.txt or http://www.myprovider.com/~mysite/robots.txt.

The file can be created in any text editor and contain the lines:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

Make sure that the filename is all lowercase.

These two methods combined should keep all bots from crawling and indexing your site. Now, it will stay a little more private for those family pictures you don’t want the world to know about.

Angie