11 votes

Website Admin Question: How to Block Google?

Posted by demifiend
Tags: google, blocking, googlebot, http, header, htaccess, web admin, ask, help

I have a personal website, and while I don't mind it showing up in SERPs for DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. I do not want it showing up on Google at all.

Google doesn't send traffic my way, I pay for my site out of my salary from my day job instead of running ads, and preventing Google from indexing my site seems like the best form of nonviolent direct action I can take to protest their continuing dominance and their "embrace, extend, and extinguish" campaign against the Web.

I figure the easiest way to do this is to add the following to my site's .htaccess file since I don't have access to the server config file:

X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: none, noarchive, nosnippet, notranslate, noimageindex

Are there any downsides that I should know about besides not showing up in Google results?

4 comments

  1. jonluca
    Link
    The meta tag within the HTML of each page and the HTTP header should be enough to prevent Google from indexing your site. Another thing to keep in mind is if you decide to post links from your...

    The meta tag within the HTML of each page and the HTTP header should be enough to prevent Google from indexing your site.

    Another thing to keep in mind is if you decide to post links from your person site to reddit or hackernews or any other link aggregator, the specific views for those pages will be indexed and might show up for searches of your website.

    6 votes
  2. [3]
    CDN
    Link
    You may find this guide by Yoast helpful. Essentially, you've specified an identifier (user-agent) and it's up to the crawler in question to follow the instructions you set. These things are never...

    You may find this guide by Yoast helpful. Essentially, you've specified an identifier (user-agent) and it's up to the crawler in question to follow the instructions you set. These things are never simple though, and you can find further information here.

    2 votes
    1. [2]
      demifiend
      Link Parent
      Thanks, but I had read both of these before posting. I also read Google's own documentation on X-Robots-Tag.

      Thanks, but I had read both of these before posting. I also read Google's own documentation on X-Robots-Tag.

      1 vote
      1. CDN
        Link Parent
        I'm not sure what the problem is then. You've specified the user-agent (googlebot), so the rules given will only apply to that case. There's nothing to suggest that you'll see any negatives with...

        I'm not sure what the problem is then. You've specified the user-agent (googlebot), so the rules given will only apply to that case. There's nothing to suggest that you'll see any negatives with conforming robots outside of Google delisting your website from their search.

        4 votes