I sing in a local chorus, which since at least 2014 has used a Blogger site to post weekly links to the recordings we make of our rehearsals. The site is for later reference by singers and for people who miss rehearsal. Most of the music we perform is classical; we occasionally do some pop in a concert around Christmas. I'm not listing the name of the chorus or of the Blogger site, because I've become a little paranoid (see next paragraph). If you really need names, private message me.
I recently horrified our new director by telling him that if he wants to give a rehearsal recording of our current piece (the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms) to the conductor of our upcoming concert, he should just give her the link to the Blogger site. The fact that the site was open to search engines led him to fear (apparently this has happened) that we'd be vulnerable to certain companies who search the internet looking for arts organizations to sue, for the crime of recording copyrighted music. I didn't catch any names of the evil companies and I wasn't aware of this. Actually, when we want people to know about our site, we usually just give them the URL. I find that the Stravinsky piece is probably not in the public domain in the U.S., it was written in 1930, 2 years later than 1928, which means automatic public domain in the U.S.
I immediately went into the settings of our site, discovered that visible to search engines was ON, and immediately changed it to OFF. I checked the rest of the settings. the meta tag to enable search description is off, and there's no description. Crawlers and robot indexing are turned off, as are custom ads. We did set up the site with FeedBurner some time ago but I don't know that anyone's ever used it, and the blog feed is active.
My goal is to have a site which can only be reached by the URL and not by a search engine. Have I done enough? What else do I need to do? Some Googling suggests I might have done this by playing with the robot index files, but I've never worked with them.
Is what I want to do even possible? After I changed the settings, I found that certain search terms (in Google, I didn't try Bing) would bring up my site. I assume this is because of caching on Internet routers? Does anyone know how long those usually take to clear out older cache entries?
I could be asked to move the whole process to Chorus Connection (which the chorus subscribes to), where the recordings would only be available to people with a Chorus Connection login (which should be members and staff of the chorus); this is doable but would take a lot of work and documentation. I would be very grateful for advice.
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