Improving online security to protect data

As the new chief of MI6 Sir John Sawers took charge of intelligence headquarters, he has rapidly found himself in an embarrassing situation regarding security whilst it was discovered that his significant other placed personal information on the internet, in particular, on social network site Facebook.

While information on the internet is wide reaching, we will discuss some of the best ways to keep your personal information personal and away from others, including the search engines.

Most people when they look for something will immediately go to either, Google, Yahoo!, or Bing to search for something. Search engines have a way of being able to capture information and index it for people to review once they search for a particular thing. But now, with the advent of social networks and online business data, a lot more people are looking for ways to withhold sensitive information from potential hackers and intruders.

In many of the social networking sites,there is an option to exclude personal information being crawled by the search engines. This means that any copy, photos, or other data will be excluded from being crawled and indexed.

For more commercial use,data can be encrypted and password protected for use only by a select few who have access to databases where sensitive information may be held. Many leading web masters and agencies are able to offer this service a standard, but it is something that those who have websites with access to vital information should know about.

For more conventional use, search engine optimization marketing companies use robots.txt and/or nofollow tags to exclude pages from the being crawled by the search engines. With robots.txt, you can specify which search engines should be excluded from crawling specific pages on a website. This works great with sites with sensitive data as you can exclude which search engines should not crawl a particular directory.

These kinds of methods can be deployed in an internet marketing strategy, for protection of data, and can save your business or personal information being used for fraudulent activity across the web.