Is it possible to keep a blog relatively private?

Not post things in the Internet? Seriously. Anything goes on the web. You are putting information out there and people WILL find it. Start scrapbooking and/or journalling.

Your most thorough option to keep this site private is to not use your name on the Internet--or, in your case, a recognizable blog name. Nothing to Google for = no Google arrivals. But.... no matter how much "no-follow" or "no-index" or whatever work you do, without password protection (and even sometimes then), you will be searchable in some form on the Internet. I think you need to think about what you're doing online. I don't mean that in a snide way! But even if you go so far as to block search engines, to strip your blog of anything searchable, to totally anonymize... some day someone you don't want to have read your site will. For example, I kept a pseudonymous blog, that used no real names, and put up nothing that was totally Googleable... and friends and family still found it! That's because the Internet, where it is not password-protected, is public.

What are you doing exactly to hide from search engines? The best method is robots.txt, which really only works if your blog has its own own domain name. So if you don't want Google Images to find images on your blog, add this to robots.txt: User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /

Yeah, sorry. You can make it so only your family can see it, but it's basically impossible to make it so everyone but your family can see it.

Some motivated close readers are really good at matching up writing styles and content to real life IDs -- so even if you strip out what you think are identifying details, you might be found.

As the others said, blog = web log = something you write for other people to read on the web. If you want other people to read it but not know who you are, just don't use any identifying information (no names, photos, or identifying description). If you don't want anyone else to read it, don't put it on the Internet! If you want your secrets to be accidentally discovered, you might try adding a few real names. Some people say it's healthier to share your secrets.

Well, what do you want here, because there are two possible solutions: Problem 1: You want a blog that only people you dictate can read. Solution 1: If this is the case, there are many things like that, just take a look at some social blogging sites, hell, I think even MySpace offers that. You just set your blog as only viewable to friends, and just don't friend your family :P Problem 2: You want a blog that everyone can access EXCEPT your family/people you know Solution 2: I can' t help you on that, all I can say is good luck. Unless your friends/family happen to keep the same IP address always (rare) and you have control over the domain enough to block the visitors by IP then there isn't really much you can do. Even that solution would be foiled by them just going to another computer.

I have a blog, which I would be pretty bristled if my parents or friends read it, so I have never ever mentioned having a blog to any of them, and use aliases for cities, occasions and names. I have a fair amount of followers and have even posted some pretty anonymous photographs (sunsets and oceans). As far as I know, no one I know in "real life" has found my blog. If they have, they didn't mention it.

I'm going to try to remove all identifying information. I don't think I have that much to begin with, but you never know. Luckily I don't think my family is too interested in my personal life...so I don't think they're going to try to go to all lengths to find stuff. (I just want to minimize accidental finding of stuff.) So, I think my biggest problem right now is these images in Blogger that apparently can't be unlinked. If I keep my site hidden from search engines, can my images still come up in an image search?