How To Prevent Undesirable Content From Being Indexed

How to prevent undesirable content from being indexed. Something this straight forward shouldn’t be too tall of an order. But for many budding webmasters and bloggers out there in cyberspace, this can be all but overwhelming. Fact is that many people out there craft content to be shared publicly later, but might not be ready or human eyes. Unfortunately though, modern search engines are unable to determine your intent unless you take very specific steps to let them know that you don’t want a particular page to be indexed.

Keep your content in a draft format. If you’re working from a blog, then the absolute easiest way to keep your content from being indexed by a search engine is simply to make sure you don’t have it set to published. For static websites, the same can be accomplished by simply keeping the page off the server.

The second method, is to provide the search engine specific instructions that you would like them to not spider through the page in question. Using a meta robot tag is the most common technique to making this happen. Lastly, you can also edit the robots file to manually disallow specific pages from being discovered.