Homepage or a blog
How much of Google juice is good for your health? There are no straight answers to that, but I think many would say fame is a better narcotic to get high than anything else. Still, it’s a good question everyone should ask themselves. Especially, if you are a blogger. I did. And you know what happened.
In brief, the prime reason that I did this was to keep my relative privacy. Now “relative” is a strong term in this context. Like, I’d rather prefer my resume show-up upon searching for my name than a movie review I did. Get me?
You’re a blogger, man. Why this facade?
Everyone knows or is getting to know (thanks to Forbes article: “Attack of the blogs”) that bloggers are a seriously opinionated bunch of blokes. I have a highly opinionated opinion on just about everything that moves. But, do I want to project that up-front to someone who—for the first time—may click on my website address from my email signature? Hold on to that thought for a while.
It’s like you’re planning to meet someone for the first time and instead of being dressed in some decent clothing and meeting-up at a decent restaurant or at an office, you invite that person in your living room that looks like a weekend. How does that sound? Well, it doesn’t sound so nice to me.
Yes, I do want to share my highly opinionated opinion (that word again) with everyone that clicks with me, someone who knows me online or has been following my blog regularly without any particular intent other than genuinely being interested in what I write about (you wouldn’t be reading this otherwise, would you? does RSS makes sense now?). But I do not want to share it with everyone—including those that don’t know me but—who would form an opinion about me just by reading a couple of my posts. That’s a very short leash. Imagine, I’m mad at something and my first post on the main page says oh f***, I want to kill this. Not a good thought, no?
What I’m saying is: unless you’re earning a living (or fame) out of your blog, your website should not start with a blog. My opinion, of course. Disagree with it, if you like.
I totally dig, dude. Now, how do I get off the Google highway?
Diluting Google juice for me was more important than just putting-up a static page. I was already the number one “Chetan” on Google when I decided to do this. Luckily, it wasn’t so difficult.
First, I edited my robots.txt file. With this you can direct web-spiders to exclude certain areas of your site from indexing. I’ve tried this often with Google and it has always worked. Googlebot honors whatever is in your robots.txt file.
Next, I added noindex, follow, noarchive and nosnippet meta-tags to my head section in the template.
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, follow, noarchive, nosnippet" />
Why follow, you might ask. I didn’t want to deny Google juice to sites that I link to, while not wanting to have my own site indexed. Simple?
Then, the static page: How do I have a static page without changing the url of the blog? With WordPress 1.5, home.php got introduced. Add this file (with whatever static content you want) to your list of theme files and it supersedes blog posts, archives and pages, while still allowing me to keep my read-write web.
And the last one: Wait. For time. For Googlebot to come and visit and remove references to your site over a couple of run-overs. Hopefully, in a month’s time, you should be off the first page. When I search for Chetan, I don’t see my site at the top of the list. Other Chetans of the world, rejoice. I’ve given up the throne 
. Though, I still see my site name somewhere on the first page when searched for Chetan, but devoid of descriptions. When I search for my full name, the resume comes-up, which I think is rather nice. Potential recruiters, I’m da man you’re looking to hire :).
Update (2006): I’m comfortable being who I am online and in real. So, I’ve rolled back all those changes I mentioned above.
I agree with your stance in making your blog readable only to people who really care and your concept of making it feed-only is simply genius.
I had my fair share of troubles lately when I wrote that Van Nguyen (An Australian heroin smuggler recently executed in Singapore) was not a martyr and he committed a crime and he has to pay the price. This apparently didn’t go well with some people, and with Google listing that post as #1 search result, I was flooded with comments within days. Some were so downright nasty that I felt as if I was abused in my own home. In the end I decided enough is enough and turned comments off. This was not a bright thing to do I guess. These people who wanted to write some more simply went to other posts and started commenting there. In the end I had to remove the post, and disable comments site-wide. That post in question is still offline and I’ve kept it that way because my stats are still full of Google hits to the missing post. The thing that striked to me is that many who were seeing my site didn’t know what was my site about? I still have comments over some posts asking “What is this about?” I had surely attracted a wrong crowd.
Whatever you do Chetan, don’t stop blogging, honestly last week I thought I would but then I thought hey why should I?
Love your work.
Cheers.
Dec 10, 05 at 08:16Hi Chetan,
You are the first person I know who doesn’t want his name on top of Google! You have made some cool hacks to the robots.txt file, but I was wondering if it has any effect on other search engines.
Btw, have you created this wordpress template from ground up? Its nice.
Dec 19, 05 at 06:09A few other engines say that they follow robot exclusion protocol, but I’ve yet to really see them working. For example, Yahoo!’s Slurp doesn’t seem to obey, even though their FAQ says otherwise.
Yes. Thank you.
Dec 19, 05 at 10:52I guess my ploy of blogging under a pseudonym worked to my benefit but to cash in on the Google’s top searches list for my name, I have a blog that focuses only on my professional and academic interests and is totally unrelated to my other blog. But I loved what you have done…sorta best of both worlds. Does linking you on blog melas and DesiPundit hurt your cause?
Dec 21, 05 at 06:28Patrix: Good question, and no, I have not given much thought on the inbound links. But I can say this much—by looking at my heavily trafficked theme post about plain vanilla—that because I do not have control over the URL link itself (as linked back by WordPress.org, Blogsome.com, users of my theme and other theme directories), the link appears higher in the ranks. In plain vanilla’s case, still the number one on Google. However, there’s no content, description or even the title listed, because that is under my control.
Generally speaking, linking to me may not hurt my cause. I’ll rationalize this further (less from technical point, more from the social aspect): people who search for my name should ideally find my resume, not my blog. But people actually looking for a useful or informative topic should still find the article (that would be the reason the article or a post gets linked in the first place isn’t it?). So, the emphasis here is on the topic and not on the author. I’m generally comfortable with that.
Dec 21, 05 at 11:34