Password-protected, Secure Blogs?
Someone asked me about using password-protected, completely secure blogs. She wants to start a blog for some of her clients, but she’s worried their competitors will be able to get to the content. I replied that I don’t know much about that sort of thing, but would ask around. A friend of mine tried using a password-protected blog on the public Internet and found that it wasn’t secure enough to keep search engines out. While doing a search, he found content from the blog in the search results. I suggested that they use blogs on their intranet (if they have an intranet), but, again, I was at a loss for advising her beyond that. A colleague asked me about blogs for an intranet a few days ago. Hoping to tap the wisdom of the blogosphere, I posted the question. I’ve only received one response, though.
June 18th, 2004 at 3:40 pm
There’s a very simple authentication system that can be built into HTTP, configured in your web server. You can protect a whole site so that any viewers must provide a proper username and password. If a site secured in this way showed up on a search engine, it was probably misconfigured; maybe its files were also accessible under another URL that was not secured. Your friend should ask her web hosting provider.
A tutorial on setting this up in the Apache web server, perhaps too technical:
http://www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth
June 18th, 2004 at 4:57 pm
благодарю вас
July 12th, 2004 at 6:39 pm
If you put this: <META name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> in your meta tags of every page in your site, then you can prevent bots from crawling the pages and indexxing them in search engines. That’s what I’ve done with my pasword protected blog, and so far I haven’t found any of my posts on any search engines.