Want to hide a website from the search results? But, not so much aware about the steps? Don’t worry, and Google will answer the question- How To Hide A Website From Search Results?
Google has its ways to solve this problem. It provides us with three different methods by which we can hide a particular website from search results. But, we have to select only one way, entirely depending on our situation.
See also: Google on using CSS to Hide Internal Links
Do you know, what according to Google, is the best method of hiding a website? Let us know the answer. Google says that protecting a website with a password is the best method of hiding it from search results, although you can consider other options.
I am now coming to the point of indexing. The websites can either refrain from indexing or get indexed and hide the content from Googlebot with a password. The action of the websites ultimately lies in their decision.
The contents can be very easily blocked from the Googlebot, which is not against the guidelines of web admins. But, this is only possible when the content is blocked from the users as well.
For instance, if the content appears to be password protected when crawling takes place, it should also be password protected. If this does not happen, then what should be the way out?
The site should have proper directives to stop Googlebot from crawling or indexing the given site.
See also: Possible Google Search Ranking Update On October 6th and 7th
Contents
Cloaking
What is cloaking? It is a problem when the website shows different content to the Googlebot than the users. This process is entirely against the guidelines that Google sets.
Three ways to hide the contents from Search Engines
Let us now read about the three different methods to conceal the contents from the search engines. These are all explained by Google, and the methods are as follows:
Password Protection
Is it the best method? Of course, the answer to the question is a yes. Protecting a website with a password is often the best way in case someone wants to keep the site private.
What happens when you protect your website with a password? The password will automatically ensure that the content you have prepared is safe from random search engines or other web users. This is a widespread practice in the case of the development of websites.
Blocking the process of Crawling
What do we mean when we say blocking the process of Crawling? This is another method by which you can stop Googlebot from accessing your file. With the help of this method, different people can get access to the website, but ‘well-behaved’ search engines won’t pick it up.
This method is not the best one, is the common consensus. Can you guess why? This is because the search engines can easily find the website’s address even without accessing it.
Now some pervasive questions can arise. Is there any chance of this happening very often? This can happen very rarely, but a possibility always remains.
See also: Data Seemingly Proves Googlebot Crawling has Slowed
Blocking the Process of Indexing
This final option includes blocking the website from the process of indexing. How can we do this? We can add a no-index robots meta tag to the respective pages.
What does this do? This tag tells the search engines not to index the page until they complete the process of Crawling. In the case of the users, they do not see the tags but can still access the page.
Conclusion
From the above content, it is very well understood that the best option is password-protected, but people can often select other methods depending on the situation.