A new option for bloggers who don’t want to be indexed.
One of the new features of WordPress 2.1 is the Privacy Options administration panel. This panel offers two options that control whether your blog is visible to search engines and archivers:
- I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers. This option, which is selected by default, allows search engine spiders and robots and crawlers to index your site and include it in search results.
- I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors. This option makes your blog invisible to search engines and archivers but allows normal visitors to access it.
Why would you choose the second option? Well, suppose you have a private, family blog which is maintained solely for the use of your family. You wouldn’t want Google listing your entry about Aunt Sally’s colonoscopy as part of its search results, would you? The same goes for company-only blogs that are on the Internet but contains relatively confidential information.
Keep in mind that the Privacy Options do not prevent unauthorized site visitors from reading site content. Only password-protecting a post or securing the blog behind a firewall can do that. Instead, the search engine blocking feature just reduces the chance of someone stumbling onto the blog by accident as a result of a search.
To access this new feature on your blog, open Dashboard > Options > Privacy.
