Ecommerce Web Design Blog

A support ticket recently came into the team from a customer wanting to know how they could block Google. With no other information, the tech support staff member thought this was an unusual request as it would be an exceptionally bold and baffling move to block the world's biggest search engine from visiting your site. When looking into the request, it turned out that the customer wanted to prevent Google from indexing their site before they had finished loading all of their products and getting things set up the way they want.

ozCart from Osc Works has a built-in maitenance mode to do this for you, but what if your website doesn't? How do you stop the search engines from finding and indexing every last crevice of your new website before you are ready to receive them?

Fortunately, the answer is simple. You can use the 'robots' tag in your HTML to prevent a search engine from indexing a page and searching for any other links in that page (and following them).

To add a robots tag into your site, go into the HTML and look for a section that starts . Somewhere between this and the end of the header section (where the HTML tag appears, insert the following line:

You need to insert this into every page that you don't want indexed just in case Google finds a page deep in your site and starts indexing from there.

When you are ready to launch, you remove this line from the code in your site and submit your site to the search engines. You're then live and can start building traffic and links.