Step 5: Harden your Web site against Google hacks

Hopefully, after doing a lot of Google searches, you have found that no sensitive data is revealed through Google. What if data is exposed though? Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly what to do, because every Web site is different. You should call the problem to the attention of whoever built your Web site immediately though.

If you have to fix the problem yourself, you can sometimes correct the issue through the use of HTML meta tags. For example, if you have pages that the public should never see, then you don't want Google (or other search engines) to index that page. You can prevent the page from being indexed by addi

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ng this meta tag to the page:

META HTTP-EQUIV="robots" CONTENT="noindex"

If you have pages that link to pages that you don't want exposed, you can use HTML meta tags to tell the search engine to index the current page, but to not index any of the links that the page contains. The code for this is:

META HTTP-EQUIV="robots" CONTENT="nofollow"

As you can see, Google hacking your own site can be a little bit tedious. If your Web application contains sensitive information though, it is well worth the effort.

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