How to Hide Your Website -- ( with style )In this short article, I will briefly touch on the 3 absolute best ways for ensuring that NO online traffic will find its way to your website.
We are going to assume first, that you have a website and secondly, that it will show up if someone on the internet types in your url or web address.
Let's review, here in 2006, what the primary sources of most forms of online traffic really are.
That would be the 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Msn, as well as half a dozen lesser search engines that don't make the front page news anymore.
At this time, this group and their networks may accumulatively provide in excess of 75% of all online traffic.
There are other traffic sources too, such as discussion boards, directories, free advertising, email lists, park benches etc..
However, in most cases, your "biggest bang for buck" will usually come from attempting to coerce the search engines into sending you qualified traffic - which you don't want, right?
So, How Does One Effectively Hide a Public Site?
Assuming that you have a working functional site called myAbc.com, let's look at what is required for myAbc.com to STOP traffic from quite naturally coming into the site.
If the artsy people at ABC.com build their website entirely in flash, it will stay hidden for a very long time. Only Google's spiders are known to look inside a flash based website and they may do so only under specific criteria - such as other web sites pointing back to that site already. So, hide your site perfectly by creating it entirely in flash.
The first thing that myAbc.com needs to do, is to somehow ensure that it is NEVER submitted to any search engine. And I do mean 'any', because submitting even to a minor search engine like
alltheweb.com will eventually come to the notice of both yahoo and google, and alas our first rule would be cardinally broken.
Oddly enough, its much more likely that Google will rank you quicker if you are found through a 3rd party website or search engine, than if you submitted your site directly to google, so... ( more on this, in a complimentary article )
The second thing that myAbc.com needs to ensure, is that it never has any content worth talking about, writing about or that would otherwise encourage other websites or blogs to point a link back to it.
I mean, it would be pretty bad if you were trying to hide your site and all these well meaning people kept pointing their links back to your content, right?
Ha ha, i can hear you now. You're saying, "its nearly impossible to stop others from writing or commenting about interesting material".
And on that point, I would almost have to agree with you.
But let's give the founders of myAbc.com the benefit of the doubt and say that they simply couldn't help themselves and actually end up writing some wonderfully, meaningful content - the first time.
What could they intentionally do to stop others from writing about them and therefore prevent leaving trails (links) back to their site ?
Well, in truth, its not possible to stop someone from writing about the great content on your site. Even google knows that - without much effort on the part of the originator - great content will be talked about, commented on, written about and "backlinks" to that content will be created.
Google has an algorithm that charts the natural growth of links to various types of sites.
Foiling Traffic in spite of great Content
But is it still possible for myAbc.com to intentionally foil the inevitable natural traffic flow even though they have great content?
What do I mean?
Well suppose myAbc.com put meaningful content on their site that had been...
a) duplicated several thousand times already
b) was in a competitive area with 178 million other pages.
c) or myAbc.com spoke earnestly and repetitiously about how great myAbc.com's product was without apparent regards to benefits for the reader.
Ahh, so is the picture then beginning to emerge?
So let's review.
To stop natural traffic flow do the following.
a) Don't submit your site to the search engines
b) Keep your content incredibly UnInteresting so that no one else ever wastes time by linking backwards to you. If you do have something interesting to say, "Make it all about You" and I am sure that ur visitors will "get it", right?
c) Pick the absolute most competitive theme that you can for your website, so that if you do get listed in the search engines by mistake, you will never ever be found amongst the 174 Million competing entries.
You're beginning to get the idea, i see.
But there is more...
If you're still reading this, either you find it oddly amusing or you're in one of the government departments where information should be made available to the public but, ahh, maybe you really don't want to?
Stay with us, we have the meat coming right up.
Other ways of stopping the search engines.
I have a short list of 3 other ways of ensuring that your info either can't be found or people simply won't come back.
For this list, we are going to get a little technical.
1) Misuse of the robots.txt file.
This file is required to stop some robots like picbot, or to literally slow down a resource hogging robot like msnbot or to simply stop any robot from indexing a folder which may contain sensitive information.
If you are really trying to hide your site information, not having this file is not enough, you're going to have to tinker a little.
Incidently, the file must be accessible in the root of your domain www.myabc.com/robots.txt - and must be called robots.txt and not robot.txt
Misuse this file and it could stop most if not all robots from indexing your site.
Misuse it like this.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
instead of like this
User-agent: picbot
Disallow: /
...and you would have accomplished an interesting phenom. Your site would not simply disallow the pesty picbot but would disallow all major/minor search engine bots too.
One of my favorites however is this one because it could take months before any one else either found or changed this.
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW
To find applications to help you make "straight up - english sense" of your current robots.txt file, type the keywords validator and robots.txt into google.
2) Make sure that every one of your html title tags have the exact same nonsensical information. I recently advised several extremely well known internet sites concerning a few tens of thousands of pages which had the same title.
The web page TITLE tag is used heavily by msn and yahoo, and to a slightly lesser degree by Google as the primary indicator as to the content of a page. If your titles ( top of the IE bar ) are all the same, then you stand a great(er) chance of not ranking on any keywords at all. And this is a GREAT way of stopping traffic.
3) Trust explicitly that your web designer left NO html errors in the work done for you. Internet Explorer is a remarkably, friendly browser and will wonderfully hide tens of potential html errors in your site, from your sight.
However, oddly enough, the msnbot from microsoft is not so forgiving and may stop spidering a page entirely if " the severity of error level" triggers a "stop spidering" event. Most other bots' ( as they are called ) will also stop at some severity level. Simply put, when the Bots stop - no page insertion in the search engines occurs . Another excellent method of stopping traffic.
Use this link to find the official web validator.
http://w3c.org
There are of course a few dozen additional ways to "Hide your website".
- Don't put it on your business card.
- Don't put it as signature in your email.
- Don't blog about it.
- In fact, just don't mention it.
- Use un-imaginably long domain names
- Get a .net domain without the .com so u can drive meaningful traffic to your competition at the .com version
- Don't buy Google PPC and if u must use that PPC budget, drive it to the front page or better yet, someone else's site.
Note that of the 32.3 million entries found on Google with the keywords "hide a website", none of the top 300 sites found for this phrase were actively attempting to hide their website.
So, is this the first document written that actively seeks ways of doing just that?
Further, have I wasted your time writing an article about essentially "hiding your website" when no one else online is actively promoting such healthy activity?
Perhaps?
So, then ask yourself, "why are you hiding your website"?
We have had a bit of fun with this article.
Stay tuned for "10 ways to increase your customers' Intense Feeling of Discomfort when they get to your Shopping Cart Page
Find article under:
