Need to hide a page from search engines - how please?

[OhYouBadBadGhostie]

I'm a webmaster for a site. I need to make a particular page one that doesn't come up in search engines. How please?

The proper way is to lock it down with some security on your website. Even if you do manage to get it hidden from search engines there's nothing to stop someone finding the page whether by chance or using the same mechanics as Google.

There is a metatag that you can add to your HTML which will instruct search engines and the like to ignore your page. However you're totally at the whim of the search engine as to if this is actually obeyed. Google are meant to be pretty good but other search engines may not be as well behaved.

To request that search engines ignore the site, and remember that's all it is a request rather than an order, enter the following meta tag in your HTMLs header section.

If the page has already appeared on a search engine then you'll need to follow that particular search engines instructions to get it removed, Google's, for example, are here:
www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

As said this really is no substitute for proper security so please be aware of that.

you need a file called robots.txt in your root.

Mine is set to
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Still be aware though that blocking using a robots.txt rather than tagging individual pages is still something that can be ignored by search engines.

It's the difference between putting a sign on your door saying "please don't come in" and actually locking it.

thank you both. I'm in the process of creating the page atm. I'll bear it in mind that its not very secure.

I'm trying to get round the fact that gmail won't let me attach a file when I'm using canned response. I want to attach a pdf, and thought that burying it in my website would be a way round that - by putting a link to the file in to my canned response email.

liamsdaddy - would that not hide the whole website?

Follow LiamsDaddy's link to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

There's a section there on how to use the robots file to block one file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

Given how your file is a PDF that would be the only way to do it as the PDF isn't HTML and so won't have the META tag.

What you could do is to put the PDF in a password protected ZIP file and then email the password to people who can get the file That's by no means invulnerable but is a slight and easy improvement on just putting the file there.

Fantastic - thank you :) I'll give it a go.