I have developed a working web site for a small club, and for debugging and testing purposes, uploaded it to a space on my ISP’s server reserved for subscriber home pages. As part of the testing procedure I did a search for the web site, and to my surprise, it came up with a result from the AltaVista search engine. How can I hide the website from browsers, and can that be achieved?

By removing meta-tags you can reduce the likelihood of the search engines ‘crawler’, or ‘robot’, finding your website, but you cannot completely eliminate the possibility. However, there are ways to stop search engine ‘crawlers’ indexing your website. For example, have a look at www.google.com/remove.html which is how to prevent the Google robot and other search engine robots, from indexing your site. Suggestions include placing specific meta tags (tags containing information about your webpage, for example, keywords which search engines use when indexing your site) within your HTML code to stop robots from indexing the pages. Another way to stop search engines and unauthorised people from accessing your website, is to password protect the pages. I would suggest that if you would like to password protect your web pages, contact your ISP and ask them to setup password protection on your web space. This would be the simplest and easiest way to protect the pages and doesn’t require any expert knowledge about security on your part.