Keeping Visitors Away

Search engines employ little programs called robots or spiders to hang out on the Web and look for new pages to add to the engine's index. But sometimes, you don't want search engines to know your page exists. Perhaps it's a personal page designed only for your family or an internal page for your company. You can add information to the page so that most search engine robots will stay out.

To keep search engine robots out:

1.	In the head section of your page, type <meta name="robots" content=".
2.	If desired, type noindex to keep the robot from adding the page to its index.
3.	If desired, type nofollow to keep the robot from following the links on the page and indexing those pages.
4.	Type " /> to complete the tag.

Figure 24.8. When a search engine's robot encounters this page, it will ignore both the page and the page's links.

Tips

• Separate multiple values with a comma and a space.

• With a couple billion Web pages in existence, the easiest (but not foolproof) way to keep people away from your page is to never create any link to that page from any other page on your or anyone else's site (and, obviously, don't submit it to a search engine).

• If a page has already been indexed, you'll have to go to the search engine's Web site and use the Remove URL page.

• You can use the values all and index to have robots add the current page (and its links) to the search engine's index. However, these are the default values and so leaving them out is the same as specifying them (but faster).