How to prevent search engines indexing a specific url

Question

I have a url which i don't want indexed:

http://www.mysite.com/moduleA?param=secretkey

So when i google search for "mysite.com", i don't want the above link to appear in the search results.

However, the following urls are part of public viewing:

www.mysite.com/moduleA
www.mysite.com/moduleA?id=12345
www.mysite.com/moduleA/somepage.html

Can this be done? Can robots file be used for this?

Answer 1

A few things you can do:

• Block that URL in a robots.txt file.
• Output a ROBOTS META tag in the header when that param is included.

Ultimately, though, nothing secret should ever go directly in a URL like that - not all web crawlers obey these robots instructions, and some (spambots etc.) specifically search them out and look at them.