I’m making a simple single page website for a friend. How do I publish it without making it searchable and where only my friend can see it. She lives in a different city, so we need to collaborte virtually.
I’m not great with the language of the internet.
Thanks for understanding.
As long as the domain wasn’t used in the past, no link is pointing to it, and you’re not adding it to the Google search console, no crawler will know about it and index it.
@Jannis - are you sure?
In my experience it takes about 10 seconds for Google to find any new domain, whether you add or not to any form of registry, crawler or link or not from anywhere else.
Doesn’t matter. Google knows and will crawl it.
Even the mere fact that someone types the name of the domain (as in the developer working on it, for example) tells google the site exists.
What else is “hey we track what you do” here for?
@BHip
The only you can do that is really avoiding anyone and anything to get to your content is adding a server level protection (htpassword).
Nothing else. Nothing else will guarantee you 100% that nothing and no one is looking at, indexing or else your site. And, it is very easy to share that password with your client, so they (and only they) can look at the site.
You can risk trusting the robots and add robots directives to a robots txt file, but, there’s no guarantee anyone will respect that and I highly discourage from “trying it out”.
That might be the case, yes.
If you have a personal website I would add a directory to the server and put her ‘private’ website there. Don’t have any links to the website from anywhere and while crawlers will see the domain, they won’t see the sub-directory. You can provide a link to the directory via email.
Also, you can password-protect that directory using your web-host management software and use that for additional protection.
Thank you!
You can also add this to your htaccess file if you want to avoid having a website indexed.
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"