I have a small personal website (let’s call it “PersonalSite.com” )
that I’d like to NOT have listed with the various search engines. The
site is included as an Addon Domain with the web host for my regular
commercial website. Here are my questions:
Can I upload a robots.txt file to the server so that it affects only
the personal site and not the commercial site?
Where exactly on the server would the robots.txt file go? The term
“root level” doesn’t help. I have a folder named “/public_html/” where
my commercial site seems to reside. Within that folder, there is
another folder named “qrhy” where all of my personal site stuff is
located. Is this where I would place the robots.txt doc?
Once I’ve accessed my web server via browser, can the txt file be
simply dragged to the appropriate folder or do I have to use an FTP
app?
Where exactly on the server would the robots.txt file go? The
term “root level” doesn’t help.
The proper term would be “web root”, meaning the level where this
site’s home page (index.html, usually) is stored.
Once I’ve accessed my web server via browser, can the txt file be
simply dragged to the appropriate folder or do I have to use an FTP
app?
You need to upload the file to the site. Accessing a site using a
browser is a read-only process (*) so you can’t do it that way. Use
an FTP program to do this.
(* Historical note: the original vision for the web was that browsers
would be editors too, and pages could be edited as easily as they
could be read. That quickly fell by the wayside.)
Is the robots meta tag approach effective?
With the caveat being that it relies on cooperation; it is just a
request not to follow or index - yes, it is pretty effective.