How to Use Robots.txt to Hide Your Dumb Blog

Completelydeleting something from the internetis like corral drunk , feral cuckoo after arrange them loose : bloody near unimaginable . But there are ways to hide the web content you do n’t want anyone to lay eyes on . you may hide all sort of webpages with what ’s fundamentally a “ Keep Out ” sign of the zodiac for lookup engines : a peculiar filing cabinet called robots.txt .

The robots.txt file acts as shortcut to bury content so late it ’s hard to dig up . As BuzzFeed recently illustratedwhen it tried to hide deleted station that were vital of properties of its adman , robots.txt is a middling strong coverup pecker . If you require to dodge responsibility for something you ’ve issue , the file will partially conceal your tracks . The internet ’s memory is long , and robots.txt is a forgetting protocol .

BuzzFeed used robots.txt to make it hard for people to find a few posts about Dove and Monopolythat it had deletedin a bout of editorial betise . By supply the URLs of these ghost posts to its robots.txt directory , it prevented older versions from show up in online searches . This did n’t mean the posts were gone whole . citizenry can always go digging through your robots.txt file to see what you ’ve hidden , so it ’s not effective for wholly killing your spot . But it made it so that Unilever execs pissed about the deleted Dove commentary would not be able to find out it unless they specifically rummage through BuzzFeed ’s robots.txt directory .

So how does it work ? lookup locomotive engine like Google , Bing , and Yahoo often cache older versions of webpages , meaning it ’s fairly dim-witted to find a copy of a deleted post . The Internet Archive ’s Wayback Machine also archive copies of gone posts , preserving a digital record . In general , this habit of preservation is a boon for protecting digital account . But when you want something to be block , this propensity towards record - keeping becomes a problem .

However , Google , Bing , Yahoo , the Wayback Machine , and a variety of other lookup robots will listen to your bid not to keep a phonograph record . Most of the robots used by search engines will look for the presence of a robots.txt data file decently off , and will obey instructions to take out content .

For a professional media company to self - censor is shady as hell , but perhaps you , good reader , have a better reason . make a robots.txt file to obliterate your shameful exploitsis very well-off . You open up a text edition editor and typewrite the following :

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User - agentive role :

Disallow :

Then you customise it with exactly what you want to disallow , and economize it as a .txt file . It ’s important to use lower-case letter for “ robot ” and to make a separate “ Disallow : ” dictation for each expulsion .

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For the Wayback Machine , for representative , you indite this andit’ll retroactively scratch your page :

User - factor : ia_archiver

Disallow : /

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After that , you upload the Indian file to the etymon directory of your domain ( it has to be the main one ) . If you do n’t have direct accession to the directory , contact your web admin . you could also congeal up commands that just hide one specific placard , or commands that stop multiple crawlers from searching .

This is n’t just useful for hiding embarrassing adventures in blogging — it ’s also helpful for hide password - protected pages and sensible information . E - commercialism services can use robots.txt to keep databases that incorporate guest ’ personal data conceal away .

Some sites get originative with their robots.txt files — Yelpincludes instructionson the off chance that the robots become sentient as an privileged joke . And may WWW admins include direction in robots.txt to help their sites get crawled more quickly , so it ’s as much a tool for guide robots around as it is a tool for enjoin them to stay out .

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Most of the time , people try out to get their cyberspace subject discovered . But robots.txt , which has been around since 1994 , highlight a persistent desire for a storey of restraint over how what we put on the web gets pass around around . When medium companies backtrack on what they ’ve published , it draws aid to how this tool can be used for coverups . Yet there are many understanding why people want the chance to limit audience , and the existence of a dick to give Godhead more king over what gets key and remembered online is a good affair .

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Illustration by Jim Cooke

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