Most bloggers do everything they can to drive traffic to their site; they want their content to be indexed by search engines. However, some bloggers find it a little disconcerting to have strangers find them through seemingly unrelated (to their blog) searches.
If you would like to ensure that the bots from search engines do not index your site for search results, there are ways to do this. Vanessa Fox is an authority on SEO (search engine optimization) and has more information than you can shake a query at. Whether you’re interested in optimizing your search engine rank or taking your blog or web site off the search engine radar, I suggest checking out what she has to say.
If you would like more information about how to take your blog off the search list, you can view this article at Google: How do I request that Google not crawl parts or all of my site?
Now, go out there and optimize those searches! Or, you know, don’t.
Just one more note: Vanessa is great (and very nice!) and her blog is a great resource. When she worked at Google, she was key in promoting outreach for webmasters.
But if you have any basic SEO questions, it’s also my field and if they’re on-topic for BB101, I’d be happy to answer them!
The easiest way to do this in WordPress it to go to Options Privacy and select the radio button beside “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” (or “I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose”).
When all you want is just a few friends read your posts, another reason to keep the search bots off one’s blog is to save the server resources(bandwidth/cpu/database queries). Web search bots and feed aggregators are avoidable drain on server’s resources if they are not needed.
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