How To Stop Googlebot From Crawling Your Website? Proven Methods
Do you know how to stop Googlebot from crawling your website? Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on the auspicious day of September 4, 1988. 20 years ago this search engine was created and nobody knew at that time Google would rise up to be one of the top web crawlers on the internet that discovers new and updated pages to add unto the Google index.
How To Stop Googlebot From Crawling Your Website?
Contents
Web crawler aka spider according to Wikipedia is said to be an internet bot that systematically browses the world wide web, typically for the purpose of web indexing.
Some people may think isn’t it better if search engines crawl all of the pages on my website, but that is not so although it is good to be crawled in a few cases, in other various cases it is considered better to stop googlebot from crawling the website.
Reasons to Stop Googlebot’s Crawling
There are various reasons to stop googlebot from crawling your website and, some of the reasons marketers consider stopping googlebot from crawling their website are:
- Prevent duplicate content,
- To make the landing pages more difficult to find for the benefit of the organization.
These points are considered very important by the people involved in this field as duplicate content can prevent the product or page from fully reaching its potential as it was originally designed to. About landing pages, there is a thing known as getting the customers information first if the customer finds the products page directly then it may create a negative impact as the marketer did not receive his/her email.
Businesses are for profit and these two reasons are reason enough to stop Googlebot from crawling the website to prevent duplication and to get the customers information first that is considered crucial by marketers.
Anyways, there are various ways to stop Googlebot from crawling your website and preventing the mentioned scenarios from happening as “prevention is better than cure.”
Ways to stop Google crawler
The article boasts about two key ways which are often used as the shield to prevent the worst from happening. So without further delay, the two points:
- Adding a robot.txt file on the desired site/page:
This is very efficient as well as an effective way to keep the bots from indexing your page on the search engines. This method works in offering you more control over what you allow googlebot to index.
This method is such an amazing one that if the user desires so he can prevent a particular page, image, file, directory from getting indexed in the search engine resulting in duplicity and other mentioned factors.
In order to use the robot.txt file to your site you must first learn about that particular topic and with time you will be the one who has no problem dealing with such situations.
- Add a “noindex” or “nofollow” metatag:
It is recommended that only those people use this method who want an easier answer to de-indexing the whole webpage or de-indexing the link to that page.
The key feature of inserting a “noindex” metatag is that it allows the web crawler to crawl the page but Spiderman cannot add the desired object into its search index.
On the other hand, “no follow” tag is used for the purpose of not allowing the search engines to crawl the page to add to its search index.
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The following is the way to add a “noindex” and/or a “nofollow” metatag.it is as follows:
Step 1:
Copy the following tags,
“noindex” – <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”>
“nofollow” – <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”nofollow”>
For both – <META NAME=” robots” CONTENT=”noindex,nofollow”>
Step 2:
On the <head> section of your HTML page add the tag.
Conclusion
These are the two methods that can be helpful in preventing the web crawler from doing its job which may create negative results for you and any marketer in the world. It is a necessary thing to learn and teach colleagues as we all know how much duplicity is found in the online platform these days.
A new movie has not been released for a day or two and you can find it on the internet. In such a world your websites exposure is not a big deal. When you wake up tomorrow you may be the one whose website has been crawled and important pages are being leaked on the search engines.
In order to prevent this from happening to make sure you understand the two steps correctly and use it like the rest of us who have gained this knowledge and are sharing it with you.
