Does your manufacturer require you to use a particular web provider?

If so, you may be in a position where you’re forced to use a web provider you don’t want to in order to receive benefits from the factory such as factory-generated leads or links on the manufacturer’s site. Many dealers choose to have two web-sites, one that the manufacturer requires and another that they feel is the best option to maximize their Internet presence.

The problem this creates is that search engines start indexing two competing web sites for the same business, which is confusing to consumers and negatively effects search rankings.

Here’s a simple solution.

Using simple text files and meta tags, you can ask search engines NOT to index your site. Combining that with a less descriptive domain name and you’ll be effectively removed from the search engines.

Here’s what you need to do:

Install a robots.txt file:

Robots.txt is a file that most web crawling robots read first to know what sections of a web site to index and what sections to avoid. It’s meant to prevent web crawling robots from indexing information not-necessary for search engines, such as forms, proxy directories and other techical stuff. However, you can use the file to ask a search engine web crawler to avoid your site entirely. It’s as simple as this:

Create a text file using a plain-text editor like WordPad. Include the following text in that file:

This file tells web crawling robots (all of them, indicated by ‘*’) to not follow any links in your site (any links, indicated by ‘/’ meaning root directory and all subdirectories).

Note: The robots.txt file is a honor-system. It will not prevent all robots, especially malware or security hacking robots, from accessing your site. However, it will prevent most search engine web crawling robots.

Change meta tags if your provider won’t install a robots.txt file:

If your web provider won’t install the robots.txt file, you can manually add a meta tag to each page that tells search engines to stay away. This isn’t as good as a robots.txt file, which covers the entire site with one file, since you’ll have to manually add this to EVERY page on your site. But if you have to, this is a good alternative. Simply add the following meta tag to each page on your site:

The content tag, NOINDEX, tells the robot not to index the page. The content tag, NOFOLLOW, tells the robot not to follow any of the links on the page, preventing the web crawling robot from following links on the page.

Stay under the radar:

I wouldn’t recommend that you call your web provider up and say, “I’d like to make sure your site is removed from search engines so I can use another provider.” Right now, we don’t seem to have much difficulty getting these changes made. However, if manufacturer-required web providers become keen to this, I’m sure they’ll stop the practice.

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