make-blog-private-and-unsearchable
Many people write blogs to share their thoughts with everybody and
anybody. However, you may also use your Blog as an online diary,
penning very personal and private thoughts. Like all diaries, you can
either allow a select few persons to view the Blog or allow no one but
yourself the right to view it. Also, you may not want it to be indexed
by search engines, so that people searching for it on the net will not
find it in the search results.
This article lets you know how to
create private Blogs. If your intentions are the exact opposite, and
you want to publicize your Blog to the whole world, follow our other
guides to submit your Blog to Blog Directories, Google, Yahoo and Feed Directories.
First the caveat. These guidelines will only
show you how to make your Blogger blog as private as you can get. As we
shall explain, there is no guarantee that search engine spiders will
never find your Blog because any site that is available on the net will
be crawled by search engines. What we can do is to minimize that
possibility.
Note that these steps are to be taken BEFORE you
create the blog. If you already have an existing Blog, it has in all
likelihood been indexed. These tips will at best prevent future
contents from being seen.
Title and Blog URL
Do not want people
to associate that Blog to you? When you create a new Blog, select a
Blog URL and Title carefully; choose words that have no bearing or
relation to you or what you do. After the Blog is created, DO NOT post.
Post only after you have completed the following steps.
Permission
We
start with the most crucial and essential step. Blogger has made it
easy for you to create private Blogs. When you are logged in, go to
Settings -> Permissions. You can restrict your Blog Readers to only
people you choose or only the blog authors.
People who enter the
Blog URL into their browsers can still see the Blog Title but will be
prompted to enter their Google account particulars and password. If
they are not given the rights to view the Blog, a message will be shown:
“It doesn't look like you have been
invited to read this blog. If you think this is a mistake, you might
want to contact the blog author and request an invitation.”
While
the contents cannot be seen, people do know that this Blog URL with
that Blog Title exist and it is a private blog. As we had mentioned, if
you don't want anybody to know this Blog is yours, it is important to
have a Blog URL and Title that are not obviously connected to you.
Listing on
Blogger.com
These are the further steps to take, just to
be sure. Under Settings -> Basic, you can see a “Add your Blog to
our listings?” option. Choose “No”. Click “Save Settings” at the
bottom. This will do three things –
i) Your Blog will not appear
when people search Blogger.com.
ii) This Blog will not be shown
in the Blog List on your Profle page.
iii) The Blogger homepage
showcases a list of recently updated blogs but this Blog will not be
shown.
Ping
Setting
Go to Settings -> Publishing and under the
“Send Ping” option, choose “No”. Save the Setting. Whenever a Blog is
updated, Google will notify some of the tracking services of the
updates. If your Blog is private, there is no reason why these services
ought to know of your Blog updates.
Site Feed
Your Blog
contents can be read through your Site's Atom and RSS Feeds. People can
catch up on news and articles by subscribing to these Feeds and viewing
the material using their Feed readers. If you do not want your
contents to be read or syndicated, go to Settings -> Site Feed and to
the question “Allow Blog Feed?” select “None” and click “Save
Settings”.
Meta Tag
Now that we have altered the settings for
the Blog, we can add a further meta tag into our template to tell search
engines not to index the site. Click Template ->Edit HTML and you
can see the source code. Somewhere at the top, just below ,
insert this line (shown in red):-
Leave
this tag there. Search engine robots which visit your site will not
index the Blog pages and contents.
Profile
We thought we
should cover this for completeness. In the top right corner of your
Dashboard, you can go to the “Edit Profile” page. Under “Show my
blogs”, if you see a blog that you do not want people to know about,
remove it from the listing. People who view your Profile will not know
about the Blog. You can also choose not to share information about your
Profile by not ticking the box next to “Share my profile”.
External Links
The
steps outlined above are within your control but this one is not. It
is also the reason why we said we can only minimize but not eliminate
the possibility that people know of your Blog. Anybody can link to your
Blog URL since it is a valid URL. If your friends happen to know about
your Blog and write a post mentioning your Blog or linking to your
Blog, there will be an external link to your Blog. Whatever they write
about it will be public knowledge. Hence, to have an online diary that
only you know about, remember that a secret shared by two persons is no
longer a secret.
