I have a test page on my site that I use to test formatting, get approval on designs before a page goes live, etc. It’s set as a hidden but active page so that the only people who can view it are people who have a direct link.
Does setting the page as hidden also keep it from showing up in google search results, or do I need to add the bit that google recommends? If I need the html tags can I put it in the meta data under page properties or does it need to go somewhere else? Sometimes the pages can take awhile to be finished & approved, I definitely don’t want a possible customer to find them before they’re complete.
If anyone has any tips for how they test new pages I’d be happy to hear them.
Following… similar scenario but not exact. I had a hidden (not on navigation tree) “Club Only Page” with club release wines on it that somehow seemed was searchable by general public. Only knew this by seeing non-club members being able to order wines that were only on the hidden “Club Only Page”. I’m sure it was probably my error, just didn’t know the settings to have the page visible to only those with a link.
I’m not sure how Vin65 natively handles hidden pages with respect to search engine crawling, but I can tell you that, if you ftp into your account, there should be a robots.txt file in the root directory. If you want to be really sure, you can edit that to disallow the pages that you are testing. If you’re unfamiliar with the robots.txt formatting, this page is a good resource.
I usually put security on the “club only” pages so that people have to log into their wine club account to view the page. It can be a good thing or a bad thing, people definitely have to be active wine club to view it but if they forgot a password or something and don’t want to deal with the hassle of logging in they might not bother with it.
I just have a general admin account, I don’t think I have access to the robots.txt file. It’s probably for the best, I have enough general knowledge to edit the basics through Vin65 but if I had too much access I’m sure I could wreck the site.
I was kind of hoping that there was a little “hide me from google” button buried somewhere in the page settings.
I seem to recall that we’re not able to edit the robot.txt file, as it’s system generated, but I can’t find any documentation supporting this, other than this page.
Does anyone know the answer? @Brent ? I would love to be able to hide a few pages from google.
Ah, didn’t notice that. I did try to edit it and was successful - I’ll check back later and see if it gets overwritten. The reason I like this approach over using the Google search console is that it is applicable to all spiders and not just Google.
