Prevent Google and other search engines from listing a page

This page is primarily a test. It should not appear in the results of any google search. Normally performing the following search in google and most search engines would return this page among the first results. But since this page is "protected" it sould not.

"Prevent Google and other search engines from listing a page" site:ccs.neu.edu

How to do it

There are two ways to hide your pages from search engines:

• If you manage your own web server (or you can convince your sysadmins), add a robots.txt in the root URL of your server that contains the pages that you don't want to be crawled by search engines. This is your best chance that your "private" pages will not appear in the results of any search engine.
• If you don't have the luxury of changing the /robots.txt, then you can try using this meta-tag in the pages you want to keep out of the search engine results.

  <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

  NOFOLLOW prevents google from following the links of the page containing the meta-tag.

  This is what I've used for this page. Google says it respects the meta tag, but I've read that not all web crawlers do.

Here is a more detailed howto.

Google's instructions and FAQ on the subject.