hi sirs what's the best way to prevent google from showing of a folder in the search engine ?, like e.g www.example.com/support , what should i do if I want the support folder to disappear in google ? the first thing I did was place a 'robots.txt' file and include this code
User-agent: *
Disallow: /support/etc
but the results is a total disaster, am not able to use the support page anymore unless i remove the robots.txt what's the best thing to do ?
what's the best way to prevent google from showing of a folder in the search engine ?
A robots.txt file is the right way to do this. Your example is correct for blocking the /support/etc directory and its descendants.
am not able to use the support page anymore unless i remove the robots.txt
It doesn't make sense that a robots.txt file would affect the way your site functions, and certainly it should never affect which pages can be accessed by a human. I suspect something else is awry -- check your server logs to see what kinds of errors are being recorded.
While not the preferred method of limiting robot access, Google talks about using a noindex meta tag here. This will also prevent the various pages from showing up if they are linked to by a site other than your own.
A good discussion of limiting bots that visit your site can be found here.
robots.txt shouldnt affect the way your page function. If in doubt, you can use tools to generate like http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php or http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/
When dissallowing in robots file, you can explicitly specify a file or subfolder rather than just a folder.
You can also use meta tag in your document to tell the crawler not to use it
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">