Not blocking search engines.

shearjolly
(@shearjolly)

14 years, 9 months ago

I have a family blog and recently discovered that someone or some people have been locating it using terms like “naked kids” etc. Wanting to block these people but keep the blog available to my family and friends, I changed the settings to block search engines and I password protected all of my posts concerning my kids. Unfortunately, search engines don’t seem to be blocked. I changed the settings a couple of days ago and still someone is finding my blog searching for “naked kids”, “naked boy”, etc… This makes me so uncomfortable.

So, I have two questions. Why isn’t the blog truly blocked from search engines? (Indeed, I have googled it – using less offensive terms – and have also been successful). And, does WordPress count visits to a password protected even when the post is not accessed using the password (I want to know if this person or people is/are still able to view photos of my kids).

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

ryans149
(@ryans149)

14 years, 9 months ago

Search engines have already crawled your blog, so now, these pages need to unindexed. You need to block search engine during the installation itself.

Now, just wait for a few days, and let search engine “Forget” about youre blog.

No, they cant see your password protected posts. But hits will be counted on your posts, even if they cant see the contents (because they can see the title atleast!).

You can make your posts private, so only logged in users can view your posts….

iridiax
(@iridiax)

14 years, 9 months ago

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35301

sweetangst
(@sweetangst)

14 years, 9 months ago

I’ve recently made a blog for my family and I too wanted to avoid random people just finding it and seeing my pictures, so I got Role Scoper. Then I made the front page static and installed the Sidebar Login plugin so that it would show up on that page.

You can set up Role Scoper to turn off read access to all pages and all posts and etc unless the user is registered and logged in.

My setup is currently pretty complicated because I have mine set up to have post levels + user levels. So, a post is in a category level and a user must be in a group that has that access level or higher to read the post. (Basically, I made Role Scoper do what Post Levels used to do) I left registration open but set the default user level to 0… so their access is remarkably limited until I physically go in there and approve them to be a higher access level group.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/role-scoper/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sidebar-login/

Don’t try to use this, it’s not compatible.. It’s just FYI
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/post-levels/

I’m also using Gallery2 & embedded it in my Worpdress installation with another plugin, so that also requires being logged in. I’m not sure if you can protect the actual links to your photos with Role Scoper or not, but I think I saw some other plugin recently that does protect your uploaded files — I think User Access Manager might do all of that rather than using Role Scoper, I just haven’t messed with it that much yet.

http://www.gm-alex.de/projects/wordpress/plugins/user-access-manager/

fusionpowered
(@fusionpowered)

14 years, 9 months ago

I would recommend using registered-users-only plugin

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/registered-users-only/

saves a whole lot of work

Thread Starter shearjolly
(@shearjolly)

14 years, 9 months ago

Thanks so much for the advice.

I am relieved to hear that this person or people cannot view the blog’s content. They continue to find it many times each day using search terms similar to those described above.

I have a number of readers who wouldn’t want to become registered users so I feel that password protecting the posts is the way to go…

Thanks again!