Boutiques.com apparently launched with an interesting little meta tag that tells search engines to essentially ignore everything on its website.

With one line of code, they’ve told Google, Bing and every other search robot out there to ignore its content.

After reading on Hacker News How to Screw Up a The Launch of a Million Dollar Web Property, I couldn’t help but make a quick rebuttal…

I’ve noticed over the past few days a few stories talking about Boutiques.com and their alleged incompetence. Sure, they’ve blocked off all the robots out there with one line of code… but one line of code takes less than a second to remove!

So what if Boutiques.com doesn’t want to be indexed by search engines during the first week of their launch? Perhaps they are interested in releasing their new site to real human beings rather than search robots.

One line of code is easy to change, and although the hacker community has decided that they are all incompetent, it seems to me that they are generating buzz and creating backlinks with this move. I’d wager you’ll see the meta tag dropped soon enough…

Personally, I never visited boutiques.com before this debacle took place… so they certainly have more attention being devoted to them now by humans than they had pre-launch… regardless of whether or not robots like them or not.

Update: Boutiques.com is owned by… Google! Plenty of incompetent people over there. This must be an oversight… rolls eyes. If you can’t find them in a search engine, I guess you’ll have to visit the actual site.