[Lois Elaine Heckman]

I found this in our FAQ:

How do I prevent Google and other search engines from listing my posts?

There are some members who need to protect their threads from Google indexing, especially if they intend to submit workshopped poems to venues with overly rigid non-publication rules that fail to recognize that the Eratosphere-workshopped poems are not archived, and are pruned regularly on a monthly basis.

For our workshop forums -- Met, Non-Met, Deep End and Translation -- you don't need to do anything extra as protection is now automatic in these forums.

Should you also need to protect a specific thread in a non-workshop forum, a new BbCode, Noindex, has been introduced to prevent Google and other search engines from indexing and making available in their search results any thread where this code is deployed. Here are the steps you need to achieve this protection for your thread in a non-workshop forum.

When starting the new thread you need to protect from Google indexing, add the following code as the first thing in the first post for that thread:

*

Note that no value is required between the tags. Simply enter it exactly as indicated above as the first thing in your thread.
Note, however, that tests have shown that this protection code only works on the first thread-page. Thus, if your thread is popular and begins to span multiple pages and you want the extra pages protected as well, send a PM to the poster of the first reply in each of the subsequent pages with a request to edit his or her post and add the protection code as the first thing in that reply. Alternatively, you may also contact the forum moderator with this request. Again, note that you don't need to do anything for workshop forums as listed earlier -- these protection instructions apply only to threads in non-workshop forums that you feel the need to protect from Google indexing.

If there's a thread that has lost its protection after the board was converted to the new system, this can be re-instated by editing the first post in that thread and adding the new protection code to it, and if it's a long thread with multiple pages, the first reply in the additional pages also need this treatment as explained earlier. With this coded edited in, Google will drop the thread from its index the next time it refreshes its listings for the Sphere, usually in a matter of weeks.

* [%noindex][/noindex%] without the percentage marks, which I added here, in order to make the code visible in this post. If it is written correctly, it cannot be seen.