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Articles - Robots who Read
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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. For further
information, read our article on search
engine spiders and robots.
- 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:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
Putting this line between the <head> and </head> tags in your HTML
will prevent the bot from indexing that page.
An alternative is:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">
The page will be indexed, but any hyperlinks in that page will not be
spidered by the bot.
Or a combination of the two:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
Page will not be indexed, and other links will not be followed by the bot. This tag may also prevent some web-stripper (mirroring) software programs from downloading the page.
Further learning resources:
Optimization and Search engines
Search engine optimization
tutorials. Increase your web site traffic by gaining better page rankings.
Meta Tags and Zen (revised)
Easy to understand tutorial on the use of Meta Tags for boosting search engine
rankings. An optimized set of meta-tags is an important component of any overall search engine strategy.
Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
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