# Search Engines



## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

Hey everyone. I'm new to the forums, and pretty knew to Fur Affinity as well.

I have a question that's a little hard to explain... I haven't yet submitted anything to my FA gallery yet, but before I do, I want to know if there's any way to prevent search engines (like Google, Yahoo, etc) from searching my account/gallery. The reason is, I don't want people from outside of FA to find my images. I have my own public site too, but the reason I'm registering with FA is to have a private gallery that only this community will have access to. Any thoughts to share on this? Thanks!


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## garra (Jul 26, 2007)

Crawlers (that's the name of the indexing bots of the search engines, you might consider them as workhorses) can be prevented from indexing a certain page by adding one or two lines to the page's source code, but I don't think you have any way to do it on a community website like FA. 
I'd just try not linking your FA account and public account by choosing different titles or such.

Hi, by the way


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## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

Yeah, I heard there was a way to do that on your own pages, but I didn't know if, say, FA had a built in option to stop the crawlers.

That fear is keeping me from posting my stuff, though... Anyone have any other preventative tips?


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## Eevee (Jul 26, 2007)

FA appears to block crawlers from everything but the front page: http://www.furaffinity.net/robots.txt


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## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

Ahh, thanks for the info, Eevee! However, I noticed they are missing (at least) one critical folder in their disallow list, and that's "/gallery". While researching this issue, I tried Googling some of the artists I watch, and sure enough, their FA gallery appeared right at the top of the results. I wonder if we can somehow change this...?

(By the way, Eevee, I like your avatar/icon. I've got that very same Beanie, sitting immediately above my computer. =3 Hooray for Eevees! ^.^)


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## Bokracroc (Jul 26, 2007)

Use a different handle for FA then.


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## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

Oh definitely, I do. However, most of my works are going to inevitably have text (explaining character names, sources, etc), and thus I'm afraid of those turning up in a search.


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## codewolf (Jul 26, 2007)

Wolfwood said:
			
		

> Oh definitely, I do. However, most of my works are going to inevitably have text (explaining character names, sources, etc), and thus I'm afraid of those turning up in a search.



if i may ask the question.....why? why are you worried that someone will able to find you, you will find that on the internet we are anonymous, for those that havent met me in real life/dont know me personally i could be a 12 years old or 60 years old, i could be a man, i could be a woman, as far as it goes, i go under the title CodeWolf for my furry side and have up to 15 other names i go under in various other communities.


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## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

It's not my personal identity I'm concerned about (I'd like to conceal it, yes, but that's not the issue at hand). It's hard to explain, but the short of it is, I host a family-friendly webcomic/art site of my own, and I registered with FA as a place to post more mature works (as well as general too). I'm concerned that if fans search for names and such from the original site, they might wind up here. I certainly wouldn't want our young viewers to come across it, nor family, friends, coworkers, etc.


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## Rhainor (Jul 26, 2007)

So long as any mature and adult submissions are properly marked as such during the submission process, guests to FurAffinity will be unable to see them.

In order to view submissions which are marked as "Mature" or "Adult", one must not only register on the site, but must also manually go into their account settings and change the mature/adult filter to allow those submissions.


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## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

Ahh, ok, well that is a bit of a relief, thanks. Ideally, though, it would be nice if they never found out that such images exist in the first place... which obviously can't be entirely hidden, of course, but that's why I was hoping that there might be some sort of option to keep web crawlers out.


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## TehSean (Jul 26, 2007)

Yes, so anybody will ill intentions will only have to consume 5 or 10 minutes of their time to unlock the mature settings without having to prove their age because who would trust a site with a lengthy history of security problems with proof of identification and eventual identify theft?

If you are really concerned with people discovering your innermost secrets, then keep them secrets. FA is EXTREMELY POPULAR as far as the furry community is concerned, so the chance of one of your fans discovering your material and then spreading the information is probably high as well.

It's really up to you though. I'm sure your fans wouldn't react too badly.


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## Wolfwood (Jul 26, 2007)

Err, hmm, yeah, I guess it would be pretty easy to get around the mature filter... I dunno. =/

I'm really not so concerned about people stumbling across my gallery once they're already on FA; it's just the search engine scenario that makes me the most anxious, because *everybody* uses search engines.


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