I just used the really handy tools at
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-access
, clicked Remove URL
and submitted http://www.decisionstats.com
and I also modified my robots.txt file to
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Just to make sure- I added the meta tag to each right margin of my blog
“<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>”
Now for last six months of 2011 as per Analytics, search engines were really generous to me- Giving almost 170 K page views,
Source Visits Pages/Visit
1. google 58,788 2.14
2. (direct) 10,832 2.24
3. linkedin.com 2,038 2.50
4. google.com 1,823 2.15
5. bing 1,007 2.04
6. reddit.com 749 1.93
7. yahoo 740 2.25
8. google.co.in 576 2.13
9. search 572 2.07
I do like to experiment though, and I wonder if search engines just –
1) Make people lazy to bookmark or type the whole website name in Chrome/Opera toolbars
2) Help disguise sources of traffic by encrypted search terms
3) Help disguise corporate traffic watchers and aggregators
So I am giving all spiders a leave for Q1 2012. I am interested in seeing impact of this on my traffic , and I suspect that the curves would not be as linear as I think.
Is search engine optimization over rated? Let the data decide…. 🙂
I am also interested in seeing how social sharing can impact traffic in the absence of search engine interaction effects- and whether it is possible to retain a bigger chunk of traffic by reducing SEO efforts and increasing social efforts!
DECISION STATS 