Reversal of SEO

coder · #1 (**permalink**) 05-28-2005, 10:38 AM

I have a private forum, never advertised the forum, has no IBL's. And somehow the forum was picked up by google and yahoo.

How do I go about removing the site from being indexed?

cbp · #2 (**permalink**) 05-28-2005, 06:53 PM

It must have links - they would not have found you.

Put up a robots.txt file to exclude the search engines.

CBP

flood6 · #3 (**permalink**) 05-29-2005, 01:31 AM

Google has been saying for a while that they are interested in indexing the "hidden" web. Maybe toolbar data is used to find sites or pages without links.

As cbp said, adding a robots.txt to exclude robots should end future indexing.

Here's how you can have pages removed from Google's index.

If it is secure information, you may want to password-protect the whole site. The easiest way is usually with .htaccess if you are using Apache. Or only allow registered users to read/post and hacking the forum so that you have to approve new members.

SEOforGoogle · #4 (**permalink**) 05-31-2005, 02:50 PM

Anyone who visits your forum with the Google toolbar installed will make the Googlebot spider aware of that site.

coder · #5 (**permalink**) 06-02-2005, 09:51 AM

Thanks for the information. I added the robots.txt file. I checked in every SE and couldn't find any backlinks.

In the weblogs I checked incoming traffic and it listed a couple of bizarre sites, so I checked them out and there was no link listed on any of the pages listed. Oh well, with the txt file that should unlist the site from SE's.

Since day one the entire site has been password protected, except the homepage was used as an explanation for the actual members.

And of course I have the google toolbar installed so that didn't help the cause either.