Can you block a website from being in a browser's history?

Question

Strange question here.

I'm building a website for a client that is an abused women's shelter. They want to ensure the safety of women looking for their services.

One of their requests is that if someone uses their website, that somehow it won't register on the browser's history. I've never seen that before, but need to at least look into it.

My only thought is to somehow load all pages within a single page, then make that page not have the actual shelter's name in the title and url. So if someone happens to look at the history, it'll show like "Sue's Bakery" instead of the actual name.

This may be a stretch, but I'm just looking for any suggestions here.

If there is actual code to block the website from a browser's history, that'd be even better.

Thoughts???

Answer 1

There's no way to prevent a site from appearing in a browser's history. Likewise there is no reliable way to detect if the user is using Private Browsing mode (and so redirect them to a "safe" site if they're not).

As others have said; if they're accessing the site via Google, it would be best to offer clear instructions on how to remove items from a browser's history (showing different illustrated instructions for each browser).

If they're accessing the site from somewhere else, instructions could be listed there to inform them how to enable (and later, disable) Private Browsing mode.

You mention attempting to hide the site via a fake name. One way this might work is placing the site into a dummy site with an iframe pointing to the "real" site. The iframe could be for "Sue's Bakery" (as you said), but the iframe would house the content from the real website. Unfortunately I don't believe Google would like this, and so nobody will ever find the "safe" iframe version of the site through Google. Would this be a problem?

There may be a way to try and take users to the iframe version of the site, and Google to the "real" version, but it would likely be unreliable not something Google would like you to do (perhaps Google should add such a feature to their rankings for registered abuse charities -- hmm).

Sorry for not being able to offer a clear and easy solution, but I don't believe one exists.