Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, I’m MaAnna with BlogAid, and in this quick video you’ll see how to hide your
content from search bots and keep it out of both your sitemaps using the WordPress SEO
plugin by Yoast. There are several combinations of settings and I’ll tell you about the
different options and which ones are best to use to suit your content goals. So let’s
dive in. There are lots of reasons why you might want
to keep some of your content out of search, but freely available to folks who have the
link. An example of that would be the annual Site
Security Audit Special I run every year. I offer extended hours of availability for this
special across the Black Friday Holiday weekend. I’m going to scroll down a bit and show
you the special button I have on the page that let’s folks chose their preferred time.
So, since this is a special I only run now and then, it’s not something I want to pop
up in search or appear in my sitemaps. But, I don’t want to lock it behind a membership
site or other password protected login. Here’s another example. Let’s say I hosted
a free webinar and I want to make the replay available to only those in attendance for
a period of time. Again, I don’t want this to be indexed, nor do I want any of the links
followed. But, I do want to make it easy for those folks who signed up for the replay to
get to it during the time a special offer connected to it is available.
Then after that I could open it up to the public if I wanted to.
Okay, let’s jump over to the admin side of things and show you one other example,
plus how all of this is done. I’m on a sandbox site I use to make videos
and I have created a page for us to use. And here’s a third example. What if I have
a special form or a page with a link to download a form that I only want certain folks to have
access to. Over in the Publish module, I can click on
the Edit link by Visibility and I could password protect the page. That would limit who could
see it because they would need the password I provided. But that still doesn’t protect
it from search or being found via the sitemaps. The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast gives you
several options for hiding it better. Let’s scroll down to the WordPress SEO module.
And click the Advanced tab. I’m going to scroll down a bit more so you can see everything.
Now, before we get into these settings, I want to be very clear that password protecting
and configuring all of these settings properly are not a foolproof way to protect your content.
There are even more settings in the .htaccess file that stop most bots and hackers from
doing a directory listing on your site. But even with all that, if you’re selling a
digital product, you’re better off protecting it behind a real firewall where folks can
purchase it like ClickBank or eJunkie or such. Okay, let’s get busy with these settings.
The first one is Meta Robots Index. It’s already set to the default of index and follow.
What that means is that bots will index everything about it and then follow all of the links
in it to give page rank to wherever they go whether that’s inside or outside of your
site. If you don’t want either of things to happen,
then click the drop-down and set it to noindex. And then on the next setting, which is Meta
Robots Follow, click the radio button for nofollow.
We also want to ensure that search engines do not display a snippet preview of this page
either, and that includes any cached versions of this page.
To do that, go to the Meta Robots Advanced setting. You could select No Snippet, which
prevents search engines from showing the snippet and caching the page and showing a snippet
of that. But, not all search engines recognize that setting.
The NoArchive setting is recognized by all major search engines and would be your better
bet. Next we’re going to select whether or not
to have this page included in our sitemaps. You have two of them. One is called an HTML
sitemap. It’s the one that is used when folks do a directory listing on your site.
Bots can index it too, but it’s mainly for humans to read. There are even plugins you
can get to help create them on a special page for folks to access, and some themes come
with that page and a link down in your footer to access it.
The other one is an XML sitemap, and that’s the one that the WordPress SEO plugin can
create for you, and the one that you submit to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster
Tools and others to help search engines index the hierarchy of your site.
So, we want to ensure that this page stays out of both of them.
Go to the Include in Sitemap setting and select Never Include. That will keep it out of your
XML sitemap. The next setting is for Sitemap Priority,
and is also connected to your XML sitemap but is not involved now, so we can skip it.
Then go down to the setting for Include in HTML Sitemap and select Never Include.
That also takes it out of your site’s Search function as well. And that’s important because
that function was radically improved in WordPress version 3.7. So, where pages might not have
displayed there before, they may now until you change this setting.
When you are finished, scroll back up and either Publish or Update the page.
And that’s all there is to it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial on hiding
your content from search engines and site maps.
For more video tutorials, be sure to visit BlogAid.net and click the videos link to see
all of the libraries on WordPress, Genesis, SEO and AuthorRank, as well as MailChimp.