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rlbailey
05-10-2006, 01:56 PM
Hi there.
I am a webmaster for a UA club. There is a student who's name needs to be removed from all the site because this student is going to a sensitive location this summer and can't have his/her name pop up the site or any search engine .

I can easily modify the website so that their name is no longer on the webpages.
However, I am worried about :
A - Surfers who see old versions of the page with the student's name (before they press refresh, this happens quite a bit with IE).
B - Search engines who display old results of the page with the student's name on it even though the site has since changed.

Can you tell me anything more about this?
How can I fix these problems ?

Thank you very much.
dparm
05-10-2006, 02:53 PM
There's no way to remove their name from cached versions of the site, unfortunately. If you Google "no robots", you can find a way to signify that you do not want search engine crawlers to index your site.
fturtle
05-10-2006, 09:33 PM
Howdy - cool seeing you around here. :shock:

There are a few things you can do if you find that the person's name is coming up in search engines, or if you want browsers to ditch old cached copies they may have.

Usually search engines have some way to remove content, even though they don't like you to (it's bad for business). Google's page for information on this is here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301&topic=8459

Other search engines may have similar options for removing content.

You can also use a couple methods to tell browsers to update or not store copies of your page.

One method is to use a <meta> tag, but it doesn't work very well. It's being phased out in favor of cache control via actual HTTP headers, and some browsers ignore it. Also, anything that doesn't actually care about the content of <meta> tags (lots of non-browsers) might cache your page anyway. But in case you're curious, there are two relevant tags you'd use (the second is for browsers that use HTTP 1.0).


<META HTTP-EQUIV="cache-control" CONTENT="no-store">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

The <meta> tag method is not recommended.

The more reliable way would be to send a cache-control header to any client that requests the page. The only downside to this would be that you can't do it in HTML, since headers are all sent before any HTML is. So, you'd have to make your particular page use something that can do it.

It's pretty easy to do it in PHP, if it's available. Your document could simply lose ".html" in favor of ".php" and consist of:


<?php
header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
?>

<HTML>
<HEAD></HEAD>
<BODY>
your page here, etc. etc.
</BODY>
</HTML>

The stuff in the header there is actually pretty excessive. All you theoretically need is "no-store", but extra safety never hurts.
rlbailey
05-11-2006, 03:44 PM
Thanks!