protecting a freeweb

[KLB]

why bother... what are the chances of people randomly stumbling on your site, anyway. And if you don't give out the URL to wrong people than you shouldn't have a problem.

 

If one doesn't want the wrong people to see a page, this is an exceedingly bad method of "protecting" a page. Search engine bots and site scraping bots have an incredible knack for stumbling upon unpublished site/pages. Once a webpage starts to get indexed by search engine bots it becomes nearly impossible to keep a page "hidden." The only way to protect pages that one doesn't want the wrong people to see or find is to password protect said pages.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

If nothing links to that page, no search engine can find it.

[KLB]

If nothing links to that page, no search engine can find it.

 

You'd think this, but I've seen stranger things happen. Especially with default pages for websites. The problem is there are a lot of spam bots and scrapper bots that try really hard to find "hidden" pages in order to scrape content or email addresses. Even Google has stumbled upon odd pages like indexing and featuring a confidential document from Dell highlighting an unannounced lap top a couple weeks ago.

 

Security through obfusification is not security.