Not Ready for Traffic? Google Comes Anyway.
Be careful when you are launching a new site. Remember the search engines will find you if they can find links pointing to the domain. We ran across a humorous example of a site in development while reserching the term “runaway teens” for a client.
The site http://www.projectrunaway.net/ came up during our research. While it has nothing to do with our subject matter search the term runaway was the connection. Our researcher, read the first paragraph and got a chuckle. I’m sure they will finish the site soon and this post will make no sense so I have attached a screen shot for future generations.
So if you are building on a live server, be sure to block the search engines until you are ready for them. Here are two methods to employ. Both work well.
A simple addition of a robots.txt file with the following command will do the trick:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
You can also add this meta tag to head of your the page you don’t want indexed:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Popularity: 2% [?]
Want to know what Shell is doing?
2 Responses to “Not Ready for Traffic? Google Comes Anyway.”
By Angie Hartford on Jul 3, 2007 | Reply
Lesson learned. A screen shot is worth a thousand words!
By Bill Hartzer on Jul 3, 2007 | Reply
I’ve actually noticed this too…right after you buy a new domain name and you set up the hosting for it Googlebot is there and starts to index the domain. The only thing you can do is to put the content in a secure area so it doesn’t get indexed until you want it indexed.