Protecting Information from being cached by Public Search Engines

For Webmasters

To protect a Website from being Cached.

Through robot.txt

Some crawlers for search engines obey the Robot Exclusion Standard. We can simply include a "robots.txt" file to a root directory of web servers to tell crawlers what pages to be excluded. The "robots.txt" should look like the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /private/

For Webmasters and Web Publishers

To protect Web pages from being cached.

Through Meta tags

Another method is to add a NOINDEX tag to web pages those we want to exclude.

For Yahoo and Google, the tag should look like
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

For MSN, the tag should look like
<META NAME="*" CONTENT="noindex" />

References

1. Yahoo
   http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-02.html
   http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/webcrawler/slurp-04.html
2. MSN
   Visit the following URL and select "How do I control which pages of my website are indexed?"
   http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=wl_webmasters&mkt=en-US
3. Google
   http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301&topic=8459