Hiding your registry from Google

As part of our honeymoon wedding list service, we try to make sure that the introductory page of your registry can be found in Google, Yahoo and Bing. This is because many wedding guests expect to be able to get to a couple’s wedding list by entering its web address into their favourite search engine.

When we first launched back in 2007, we took steps to avoid Google or other search engines from linking to any actual registries on our site — but we quickly discovered that for lots of people, Google is the Internet. Our customers in the UK and EU can request a set of customised registry cards featuring the full web address of their wedding list, but we’d often find that guests would enter that URL into Google, which would then report that the page couldn’t be found. So we gave Google access to the introductory page of each registry, while still blocking access to subsequent pages.

This strategy worked out really well. Generally, guests are now able to find their way to the first page of your site even when entering its address into Google, and intro pages typically don’t contain your surnames, wedding date or other information you wouldn’t want to be available publicly.

However, that might of course not be the case for everyone.  We can set up your registry so that visitors can’t view later pages, including your payment instructions, without entering a guest password — but you may prefer that your introductory page is also kept strictly private.

If that’s something you’d like, just let us know, and we’ll block Google and other search engines from including your registry in their search results.

Pages already in Google’s index may take a short time to disappear. However, Google won’t index your registry until your honeymoon gift list is fully activated. If you’re still on your free trial, setting up this block will make sure your pages never appear in search engine results at all.

If you have any queries on this, or regarding our wedding list service in general, please leave a comment below or drop us an email.