Core Web Solutions Blog

Are you like me and keep a close eye on your new followers on Twitter? If you have been doing the Twitter thing for any amount of time, you should realize by now that many people follow you in order for you to follow them. That’s ok, nothing wrong with a little mutual backscratching.

There are essentially two results from this activity. You find your new follower interesting and decide to follow them too. Or, you don’t find them interesting (or worse, Twitter spam) and you decide not to follow; maybe even block them if they are nefarious.


Well, this all seems fine and dandy. But, wait… there is another result. A few days after you decide to follow your follower who initiated the relationship you find that they have already abandoned you. Why would they do this? Well, it could be that you got offensive in some way on your Tweets. But, if you have not said anything remotely offensive, why would they just leave? Easy, they were baiting you… like an angler (“fisherman” for the uninitiated). That’s right, its a little game called “catch and release”.

I guess it works for some people. You might catch people who don’t pay much attention to their followers. Or some may genuinely like that guy or gal’s tweets; so they stay. But I find it particularly disingenuous and phony. It says to me “Don’t Trust Me, I’m A Loser! Don’t Do Business With Me, I Can’t Be Trusted”.

So follow me if you like my Tweets, don’t follow me if you don’t; but don’t bait me, catch me and then release me. As my teenage kids would say, “that’s gay”.

So you need to completely destroy and remove your website and try not leave any traces behind. Well.. its not that easy to remove the pages from the search engines. But there is a way to speed up the process.

I had hard time finding a clear answer on this, but here is the solution I found that works.

This is for a typical Linux web server. I don’t know about IIS

***WARNING – This really does get rid of your website. So be sure you want to do this.

1. Backup your site (if you want to).

2. Completely delete all files from your web root. (via ftp or ssh) This includes any databases or applications like WordPress. If you have server access and the ability to terminate the account, do that. Then recreate a new account on the same domain with nothing on the web.

3.Create or update a robot.txt file with the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

4. Update your .htaccess file with the following

Redirect 410 /

(get rid of all else in the .htaccess).

5. Upload the robots.txt and .htaccess to the web server.

The result of this is that robots cannot index your site. There’s nothing there anyway but this tells them to go away and don’t come back. The 410 error is “GONE” – the resource is intentionally and permanently removed. This will speed up the process of search engines removing content from their index.

It may still take several weeks or months for your site to be gone… gone.. gone. But eventually, it will be.

Ever notice that when you’re diligently searching the web for an answer to some pressing question you keep finding sites that look like possible candidates only to find that the post you are looking at was published 5 years ago? This is especially a real bug-a-boo with technology information.

For Google’s SE algorithm “age of domain” definitely plays a role in determining what shows up at the top. But, aging content?  Hey… the things change especially in fast-paced areas like SEO, web design and other web related stuff. An article from 4 years ago is rarely relevant to now.

There has been talk about filtering older content somehow, so now (of course) I see a trend of people leaving the date of publication off their blogs. That’s just stupid. What possible reason would you want to hide this from your real human visitors. Do you want to trick them? Are you afraid that Google will depreciate your website because the content on it is old? So lets hide the date, or better yet change the date to a more current date so Google won’t hurt us! Really not smart. People who come to your site will get annoyed by your old info and even more so by you masking the actual date it was written.

Here’s a little secret… The search engines know when your content was first indexed no matter what you do with the date on your site. Changing or hiding it only does so for the human users of your site. So.. the whole idea is dumb.

So, I hope there is a filter to start archiving the old crap and showing me more recent info first. Websites just need to keep their content fresh and purge out their old out-dated garbage. The web would be a better place.