Robots who Read
Before you submit your site to a search engine, you may want to consider what you want the search engine "bot" (the program that indexes your site) to "spider" (follow). You may have pages with sensitive information, or a scrap directory full of pages in progress that you would not like to see listed.
This can be achieved 2 ways. The first way is with a robots.txt file placed in the root directory of your web, but you must have full domain privileges in order for this to work. I will cover the robots.txt file configuration in a later article.
- A quick note on the robots.txt file - do not leave it empty. This will indicate to some search engines that you do not want any part of the site indexed.
The other way to stop a number of bots from searching a page is to use META exclusion tags.
The following META tags can be used:
Putting this line between your tags in your HTML will prevent the bot from indexing that page.
An alternative is:
The page will be indexed, but any hyperlinks in that page will not be spidered by the bot.
Or a combination of the two:
Page will not be indexed, and other links will not be followed by the bot.
Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast.net
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
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