In principle, every website that is aimed at a German target audience must have a complete imprint with the following information:
- Full name of the operator
- Residential address (no P.O. Box)
- At least one method of communication: phone or email
A visitor must be able to easily find out who the website operator is and how to contact them. Legislation provides for this, and most websites must have a mandatory masthead on their website.
However, there is an exception:
A private website can do without an imprint if it serves exclusively family or friendship purposes.
This is the case, for example, when vacation photos are shared with family members or when the homepage is only used to communicate with friends or relatives or to exchange files.
As soon as a website is placed on the Internet and can be found via search engines, one should already have an imprint in order to avoid warnings.
Even if you want to use the website for profit and monetize it, for example, through advertising, an imprint must already be published because there is no longer any question of a purely private website.
If you want to run your website privately and without an imprint, you have to make sure that you forbid the search engines from indexing the website so that the subpages never show up on Google and Co. To do this, you create a file called "robots.txt" in the main directory of the website and store the following content in it:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Alternatively, you lock the website for everyone who doesn't know the password. So you have to log in with a password to enter the website. This is probably the safest way to avoid the imprint requirement.
