Posted by J.O. Aho on 01/17/07 21:33

Ed Mullen wrote:
> patrick j wrote:
>> On Jan 17, 2007 dorayme wrote:
>>
>>> You have had general advice about password protecting pages. What I
>>> do is simply put stuff up in a folder on domains under my control,
>>> the addresses highly unlikely to be quickly stumbled upon. And anyone
>>> who does is highly unlikely to have any interest or connection with
>>> you or client or likely to cause any problems. It takes a while to
>>> get noticed in search engines.
>>> Not saying you should not password protect (it might even look geeky
>>> and neat for the client!), just that is it worth it given the very
>>> small risks involved?
>>
>> That is appealing in its simplicity but I fear that the search engines
>> will have their bots doing their thing and then the pages will be
>> found that way.
>
> One thing you could do during development is simply change the name of
> the page file every day. Like:
>
> http://yourdomain.com/2007-01-17.html
> http://yourdomain.com/2007-01-24.html
>
> etc. This way you can just tell your friend that each day she can look
> at it using the current day's date as the filename. Even if (unlikely)
> search engine's find it and show it in results listings, it won't be
> there when people click on it. ;-)

Why go for a such much work when you can easily protect a subdirectory and
it's subdirectories from unauthorized people and setting a robot rules to not
log the subdirectory (most of the serious ones does respect that).

As long as there aren't any direct links to the page on the net and your
directories has indexing disabled, the robots won't find a directory.

--

//Aho

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