Wedding Blog

Weddingbee reader EastportBride posted a message in the Boards last week wondering how to keep her wedding website a secret from the rest of the world. Why would you care if anyone (aside from your friends and family) got ahold of your wedding website, you ask? Well, there are a myriad of reasons. Aside from wanting to keep your wedding details private from, say, your coworkers, you’d also want to consider identity theft. Any personal information you leak out onto the web, even if it’s just your full name and address, can fall into the wrong hands. For instance, if you’re getting married in your hometown, your mother might be throwing you a day-after brunch… your mother has kept her maiden name… you get where this is going? Someone now knows your full name, your hometown AND your mother’s maiden name… and what are the most common questions your bank/credit card asks you when you’ve forgot your password? Exactly.

…Not to mention the horror stories that have been circulating where spiteful enemies have gotten ahold of the names of people’s wedding vendors and cancelled them… and those crazy wedding crashers that steal the gift card box!

The damage ranges from low to devistating, but the conclusion is that there is no reason NOT to keep your wedding website private.

There are a lots of ways to protect your website from falling into the wrong hands, but a tech-savvy superdude showed me how to “block” your website from being recognized by search engines. Here’s what to do:

IF YOU HAVE FTP ACCESS (You’ve purchased a hosting plan from places like GoDaddy or MediaTemple)…Not sure if you have FTP Access? CLICK HERE to find out what it is.

If you’ve determined that you have FTP access, here’s what you do:

• Open a text editor, like Notepad on Windows
• Paste in the following text:

     User-agent: *
     Disallow: /

• Save the file as “robots.txt”. CaPitAlizAtioN is important, so make sure the filename is all lower case. If you’re using Windows Notepad, make sure you change SAVE AS TYPE to ALL FILES.
• Upload the file via FTP to the “root directory” of your server, so it appears at http://yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE FTP ACCESS:You probably don’t have FTP access if you are using a website generator like the free version of Geocities or you’ve purchased a “prepackaged” wedding website. However, you can still hide from search engines by tweaking your HTML template:

• Add the following meta tag to your website. The META tag should appear in the top part of the HTML page, in the HEAD section (not the BODY section)

NOINDEX means that search engines shouldn’t index this page. NOFOLLOW means that search engines shouldn’t follow links on this page to find other pages to index.

NOTE: In both instances Google will not immediately recognize the change in your file, so if you Google your website and it still shows up in a search, wait a while and try again.

Good luck!