This post is a bit different from my normal ones.
Recently I posted about the "Ninja Board." In my initial post, instead of blogging only about what I did, I also included some of my future plans for the board. I recognized that students may be able to search it up, and started searching for ways to prevent this.
I took myself to many websites searching for ways to prevent for google search.
First I changed this setting here:
Followed by some reading about robot.txt's.... I then changed some settings on custom robot tags (after failing to edit the html on the webpage itself):
Followed by some directions to go to Google Webmasters to request for the archived search results be removed.
Blah... such a tiresome process. I even took down the post for a while.
After thinking about it for a bit longer, I decided to just removed the content that has to do with future plans for the Ninja Board.
But hey, I don't believe it was a total waste of time!
what I learned from this:
- how to navigate through different functions that blogspot seems to have
- google webmasters is an interesting app that I've never explored before
- we can add custom robots tags!
- some additional knowledge about how search engines work
- to post primarily about "what I've done" and not about "what I plan to do"
Ha! That was very clever of you to realize the potential problems. Considering how interested some of your students are, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them went home and Googled "ninja board". If only you could control other blogs that talk about it! Granted, even if they learn about the general idea, it doesn't mean they know the ins and outs of how your ninja board works.
ReplyDeleteTypically revealing things on the blog wouldn't matter -- but when it comes to the Ninja Board, there is a lot of value of it being somewhat vague and hidden.
ReplyDeleteI think the way that I've removed future plans for the Ninja Board is definitely helpful (hopefully that's the case anyway!)
Thanks for your comment!