How to Keep Google's Blog Search Crawler From Indexing a LiveJournal

Google's blog search allows users to search through the index of blog posts. You can instruct search robots, to stop indexing your LiveJournal. Google automatically indexes posts public on your LiveJournal. Use a few steps to also ask them to remove posts already indexed from its search engine.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Consider whether you want keep all of your blog posts from being indexed, or just some. If you only need to hide some blog posts, you can use LiveJournal's lock features to make those posts friends-only, or private.

2. Prevent the Google search robot from indexing your LiveJournal posts by adding a command to the header section of your blog template. Open your blog template for editing and add a meta tag telling the Google robot not to index your blog, and not to follow links in your blog. You can insert the following:

3. Restrict all search robots from indexing your LiveJournal by adding a different meta tag. Insert the following line into the section of your blog to ask all robots to not index your blog and not follow links form your blog: &;t'META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

4. Instruct search robots to index only your blog and not pages you link to by inserting the following into the section instead:

5. Remove your LiveJournal posts that were previously indexed by the Google robot on Google's site. Go to Google's automatic URL removal system pages at http://services.google.com/urlconsole/controller and complete the form telling Google which pages to remove. Your posts will be removed for 180 days, but you must also add a META tag as described in Step 2, Step 3 or Step 4 to prevent them from being re-added later.