Stop a site showing up when Googling particular phrases
May 17, 2007 2:51 PM Subscribe
Is it possible to stop a page or image appearing in Google's results for a particular term, without removing those pages or images from Google's results for other, relevant terms?
I run a website which features a band with a name featuring a word for the male reproductive organ. Unhelpfully, they have a song called "Pictures". As you can imagine, this is skewing my stats, since the overwhelming majority of people who find my site through search engines are looking for photographs of willies. I don't want my site to show up in such searches. They'll only end up disappointed.
I know about using robots.txt to remove a particular page or image from Google altogether. That's not what I want to do. I still want my pages and images to come up in Google searches for relevant terms. I just don't want people searching for certain keywords to be directed toward my site.
Bonus marks for ways of doing this with search engines other than Google.
I run a website which features a band with a name featuring a word for the male reproductive organ. Unhelpfully, they have a song called "Pictures". As you can imagine, this is skewing my stats, since the overwhelming majority of people who find my site through search engines are looking for photographs of willies. I don't want my site to show up in such searches. They'll only end up disappointed.
I know about using robots.txt to remove a particular page or image from Google altogether. That's not what I want to do. I still want my pages and images to come up in Google searches for relevant terms. I just don't want people searching for certain keywords to be directed toward my site.
Bonus marks for ways of doing this with search engines other than Google.
I'd be shocked if there were any way to do that. If there were, wouldn't Googlebombing be very easily made impossible?
posted by likedoomsday at 3:20 PM on May 17, 2007
posted by likedoomsday at 3:20 PM on May 17, 2007
Is is possible based on the referer, since the referer contains the URL to the search results, and one of the parameters is the query used.
It would have zero effect on avoiding googlebombing, because when the search engine spiders crawl your site, they don't have a referer. You could redirect users that came to the site as a result of clicking on the bomb, but that wouldn't do anything to stop the bombed site from continuing to appear as the first hit in the SERP.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:46 PM on May 17, 2007
It would have zero effect on avoiding googlebombing, because when the search engine spiders crawl your site, they don't have a referer. You could redirect users that came to the site as a result of clicking on the bomb, but that wouldn't do anything to stop the bombed site from continuing to appear as the first hit in the SERP.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:46 PM on May 17, 2007
Replace the offending word with a picture (gif/jpg/whatever) of the word?
It's just one song title that's a problem right?
It's kinda poetic too. A picture of the word 'Pictures'.
Presumably at some point after google reindexes the page, it won't hit on that word anymore, since it'd be a picture and not an indexable word... unless google has been working on OCR/captcha-defeating technology that I wasn't aware of.
Anyway, it's just an idea.
posted by yeoz at 8:26 PM on May 17, 2007
It's just one song title that's a problem right?
It's kinda poetic too. A picture of the word 'Pictures'.
Presumably at some point after google reindexes the page, it won't hit on that word anymore, since it'd be a picture and not an indexable word... unless google has been working on OCR/captcha-defeating technology that I wasn't aware of.
Anyway, it's just an idea.
posted by yeoz at 8:26 PM on May 17, 2007
Best answer: Quit worrying and rejoice in your free traffic. Sure, 95% of the people will be disappointed and leave, but a few may stick around and listen to your music. That's the whole point of your site, right?
posted by chrisamiller at 9:05 PM on May 17, 2007
posted by chrisamiller at 9:05 PM on May 17, 2007
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Psychnic at 3:17 PM on May 17, 2007