Hiding From Search Engines

redcrown

My site is a small, non-commercial place, intended only for people to whom I give the address. So I don't care about search engines and would like to avoid them for two reasons. To keep strangers from wasting my bandwidth, and to keep strangers from cluttering my Statcounter log.

This recent SmugMug thread gave a tip: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=43163
and led to this Google page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=33581&topic=8460
which said to insert this in the Head Html:
< META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="nofollow">

That apparently works only for Google. So I Googled "Hide from Search Engines" and got links that said combinations of the following will prevent most search engines from indexing you pages:

< meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
< meta name="robots" content="noarchive">
< meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive">
< meta name="robots" content="none">

Most of that came from here: http://www.theallineed.com/webmasters/04092203.htm

But I can't see any way to verify that this works. So, can anybody confirm or deny this logic? Looks like you can cover all bases with the one entry:
< meta name="robots" content="none,noindex,nofollow,noarchive">

Question #2: Anybody know a way to get out of a search engine index once you are there? About 90% of my "stranger" hits come from Yahoo indexing of two image names that were on my old, pre-SmugMug site. Since I've redirected by old URL to my new SmugMug site, those hits are displaying my SmugMug home page.

For the curious: I had 300+ images on my old site. One was titled "stone guitar" and one was titled "mona soft". Those are the only two "keywords" that are search engines are sending my way. Apparently there is a lot of interest in guitars, and I've determined that the "mona soft" hits are the result of searches for "Mona Lisa".