You mean I don't have to start commenting as Stephen Philip Quincy Arthur in order to preserve the employability of the real ben w-lfs-n?
I have/had a blog that I kept mostly off google through the nofollow tag, but a few post URLs (no cache, though) did make it into google and other search engines. The problem seems to be that the engines pick up links posted on other blogs.
So your only hope of truly hiding seems to be to have no referrals.
Wait, does this mean we will no longer be able to use Google to find the one comment among the million monkeys' typing upon which in-joke 43 depends?
No, we're still in Google, just not cached.
I deployed this option so as to be able to bail out more effectively if that time came.
The sheer idiocy of that column on how all bloggers are shitty job candidates was really frustrating to me.
I had an ill-considered run at a blog (before it was cool- late 2001) and stupidly used my real name. (Blogger registration said, "What's your name?" and I thought I would later have a chance to pick a pseudonym, then I never bothered changing it.) It's not in google but is in the wayback machine, and references to it are in google and other bloggers archives. For the rest of my life people can find the things I wrote that I don't necessarily want to be out there. People don't consider that forever is a long time.
Alternatively, I could revive the blog and claim that I've been on a four year hiatus and that I'm one of the pioneers of blogdom. Bow down before me.
I would suggest using different pseudonyms at different sites.
I recommend using a robots.txt file instead of the meta tags. The meta tags are a newer way to manage search engine indexing and archiving, and not all search engines recognize or follow the tags. Why go to the trouble to manage the way google archives your site, but leave Yahoo and MSN free to archive everything for all eternity? Using a robots.txt file to give your preferences is the way to go, at least until the rest of the search engines build in the functionality to accept the meta robots tag. Complete instructions are listed at the link that ogged provided in the post.
Using both wouldn't hurt. Just to note: MSN and Yahoo also respect the "meta" tags.