A common problem faced by both Google and bloggers is that sometimes a post will unexpectedly become the number one link for a common search term, leading a gaggle of unsuspecting web users to the bloggers site.

It is certainly possible for a website to determine that a user landed there via a search engine, since the referrer URL contains the search terms and the URL of the search engine.  In fact, there is already a plugin for Expression Engine that examines the referrer field to highlight search terms in the text of the page.  It occurred to me that this could potentially be modified to redirect the user to an intermediate page for certain posts.  This page would warn the user that they had landed on a private weblog and give them the option of returning to Google or going on to the actual article.

The behavior of the plugin could be controlled through the addition of a new flag to the set of fields stored for each weblog entry.  If someone really wanted to do it nicely, a second field could be added that contained custom text to be displayed on the intermediate page for that specific post. 

I think of it as sort of like shields for your weblog.

If I don’t discover that someone has already done so, I may code up something like this when I get the time (which may be some time next winter the way things are going right now).