Hide web page from search bots

[thunderlizard]

I have a website, but there's one page in particular that I don't want to appear on search engine indexes. I know this used to be achievable using meta tags or something about 10 years ago, but I'd imagine the search bots have probably got wise to it by now. So can it still be done?


The reason is this: the page in question is my company's contacts page. One of the office addresses is a particularly sought-after bit of city-centre real estate and I want to show it on the website. But it's on a lease that (if you read it in a very literal, boorish way) doesn't appreciate commercial use. I don't want the landlord to be able to Google for "123 Swanky Street SW1" and get the hump when he finds it.

ta,
tl

[wxman]

It may be old - but it still works - try a robots.txt file in the root of your web site.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

[thunderlizard]

mustard, I shall give that a try!


tl

[Jog On]

it's noindex

try :

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html

HTH

Edit!!

should say

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

If you don't want to pass on Google pagerank (which I'm guessing you don't)
So this edit won't make any difference

[thunderlizard]

you guys are the best!

I have done both those. (unfortunately too late: I'm right there on google page 1! Hope google's got a short memory.)

Hope I've got robots.txt right.

If the site is www.thunderlizard.com and the page to conceal is www.thunderlizard.com/findme.html,
I've got www.thunderlizard.com/robots.txt
and it contains:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /findme



edit: wow I didn't know there actually was a www.thunderlizard.com! it looks cool but it's not mine sadly!

[2uk]

I think ( which is not a factor at all ) that simply removing all href references to the page should hide it from the bots. That s how they work. Of course you need to make sure that the web server is not returning the list of the html files in a dir on a general request ( one that is not absoolute with the page url )

[thunderlizard]

but that would make my page impossible to get to wouldn't it?

[2uk]

but that would make my page impossible to get to wouldn't it?

kinda. Unless they know the exact url.

[Burdock]

but that would make my page impossible to get to wouldn't it?

You could use Javascript to call the page.. i.e. use 'document.location.href='yourpage.htm'. You could use images as links then, or even anchor tabs without the 'href' part.