Hi Carol,
In the message "[Micronet] concerns regarding finding people on the
web", dated 2001-01-19, Carol Sitea wrote:
>I have a user who is concerned about the ease with which her work home
>page comes up in searches for her on the web. When she does a search her
>page is one of the first 5 that appears. She does not want her
>information to be that readily available to whoever wants to take the
>effort to look for her. I am not sure what the searches are looking for.
>
>I tried changing the title but that didn't make any difference. Can you
>give me any hints about how to tag things to not be found?
The Search Engine Watch Web site offers a "Search Engine Submission
Tips" guide at:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/index.html
Among its sections, this guide describes how search engines rank
Web pages. Although the guide is oriented toward those who would
like their Web sites to be ranked more prominently in search engine
results, presumably the information provided could also be used to
help one's Web pages become less prominent in search results.
Another approach might be to use the Robot Exclusion Protocol to
request that search engine robots not visit her page, or not traverse
the directory path containing her page. This protocol, which is a
convention voluntarily followed by most prominent search engines, is
described at:
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/exclusion.html
After doing so, her page will start to 'disappear' from the search
results returned by search engines, although it may take some time
for this to occur.
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following was automatically added to this message by the list server:
For information about Micronet, its meetings and events, and its
mailing list, including information on subscribing and unsubscribing,
see the Micronet Web site at <URL:http://wss.berkeley.edu/micronet/>.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 19 2001 - 16:04:33 PST