[SimonHickling]

Originally Posted by davews

And you can add to your comments:

None of those methods are available to those who use free hosting provided by their ISP (ie BTOpenworld/Geocities/NTLWorld etc). We have no facility to use https or set up robots.txt.

(I have just noticed that one of the sites I am responsible for hosted elsewhere can be accessed by https. But that comes with a drawback in that the supplier of the space has a self-signed certificate which flags an insecure warning in many browsers. Nothing I can do about it myself but complain to the hoster, but people have already been doing that for years and failed to get it changed. I would prefer my visitors not to be put off by a certificate warning outside my own control..).

Just sent this :

I've just realised that none of your options are available on many ISP "free" hosting. The robots.txt is held at the root level, https would only be available if the ISP provided it and made it the only way of accessing and many ISPs do not provide the option for http authentication to the users' folders.

Simon