Hello !
I would like to know if these settings are sufficient to be “hidden” on the web, I mean not to be offered by search engines ?
If not ; what can I expect from these settings ?
Not really sufficient enough. That would only demote your website from the big search companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc) that respect the robots.txt file. All the potentially thousands of other search bots would still get through and show your website in their search results.
A password protect with a .htaccess would be impenetrable to all unauthorised traffic. Definitely the best option.
OK, that’s pretty much what I thought, thanks !
;-)
I would click the “Enable Robot Meta Tags” box. With it checked and the other two un-checked, RW will add a robots meta tag to the page with “no index,nofollow”. Without checking it, that meta tag is not added. I think it’s better to have that meta tag on the page.
I could be mistaken, but I don’t think RW generated a robots.txt file in the root of the site. If it doesn’t and you don’t have the robots meta tag on pages, search engines will default to indexing them.
It’s still better to password protect the page to be 100% sure it’s private.
Oh yes ; that I never thought about !
The idea, right now, is just stay discreet, but I wondered what if, sometimes, you want to be completely invisible…
So I’ll check the “enable robot meta tag” box if it helps not to be searched.
It should help for the major search engines like Will mentioned. They should adhere to that setting, but there is no guarantee that they or other search engines in the world will, which is why we recommend password protection.
It really depends on what you’re trying to keep hidden and the effort you want to go to to keep it private.
Yes ; as I told, these settings will be just fine for my needs right now, but I’ll know what to do if, someday, I need a secret website.
Thanks !