Search Engines, The New Wedding Crashers
Lately there have been a few weddings crashed by the search engines or at least that’s who is catching the blame.
Last week there was a post on Tech Dirt about lost wedding gifts being blamed on search engines. Apparently random consumers were lead to online wedding registries by the search engines and they purchased products from them without realizing that they were in someone’s wedding registry. This, of course, interferes with the registry by removing the purchased items from the lists. I thought this was funny and didn’t give it much thought until I visited the Grey wolf blog.
There is a recent post on Grey Wolf’s blog about wedding gift registries that were getting used by criminals to figure out when newlyweds were going on their honeymoons and then burglarize the homes while the owners weren’t there. This is a much more serious issue.
First off, the search engines are not at fault. There is no way that SE engineers would have considered wedding registries when they built their search engines. It does, however, present an opportunity to the SEO community.
I am sure that with a little bit of thought an SEO could think of several types of websites that do not want to be found by the search engines, and use their knowledge of SEO to un-optimize these websites (provide private websites).
From an SEO standpoint, website developers may want to consider creating easy, almost cookie cutter, websites that are not indexed by search engines just for events like wedding registries. There seems to be a market for them.
Here are a couple of ways to avoid having your wedding registry invaded by strangers:
1. Use robots.txt when designing your site to prevent search engines from indexing your site.
2. Make it evident on each page that the site is for purchasing gifts for an individual wedding.
3. Put all registry information on password protected pages to ensure the SE spiders and hackers don’t get to them.