10.25.2003
More Privacy Features
Posted by Benjamin Trott in Development News
This past week, we released a new version of TypePad with a couple of small new features, and a couple of improvements and fixes.
One of the new features is completely transparent to those of you with private weblogs or photo albums: your private pages are now marked as private, and Google and other search engines won't index them. We're doing this using the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which is a guide to (polite) search engine robots to tell them where they should and shouldn't go.
This new feature is automatically enabled for sites using the Template Builder; if you're using Advanced Template Sets, you can exclude your pages from search engines by adding this tag at the top, in the <head> section:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
When a search engine sees this tag, it immediately stops processing your page, doesn't follow any of the links on the page, and doesn't add it to its search index. This means that people searching for your page in Google, for example, should not be able to find it.
Note, however, that even this does not provide true privacy--if you want to make sure that only certain people can access your weblog or photo album, your best option is still to use Password Protection.
