Support » Fixing WordPress » Block just indidual page from google’s crawler

  • Hi I update a website for a campus club. We want our website to be easily found with google and it currently is. However at the same time our club can be kind of controversial and we have a contact page. For this reason I want to block JUST the contact page from google’s crawler. This way if someone searches one of the officer’s names it will not come up on google’s index. However I want it to be that if someone searches the club name they can find this.

    This is basically because the club deals with religion which people can be touchy about. The officers just don’t want it where if someone (like a future employer) googles their name they will pop up.

    I looked at the settings and privacy page and it looks like you can block your whole wordpress site from being indexed but not just one single page. I’m just curious if there is any way to do this either through wordpress or robots.txt. Any help would be appreciated.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter sirgrant

    (@sirgrant)

    Yeah ok I know I can use robots. The problem is the only way to block an individual page is to insert a <META> tag into the HTMl code into the page.

    The problem is I don’t know how to access the HTML code of the page to put it into the <HEAD> section. If someone can help me figure out how to edit the HTML of a wordpress page that would be great.

    Yeah ok I know I can use robots. The problem is the only way to block an individual page is to insert a <META> tag into the HTMl code into the page.

    thats not true, and thats why I directed you to do some more reading.

    using a robots.txt file prevents a url from being spidered, negating the need for any further fiddling.

    if you cant take my word for it — take Google’s :

    On getting a url removed:

    … use a robots.txt file or meta noindex tag to block crawlers from accessing your content.


    all emphasis is mine.

    Thread Starter sirgrant

    (@sirgrant)

    Ok yes it is clear that you are telling my to RTFM. I have been doing that all night and am not understanding how to accomplish what I’m trying to do. Sorry if I’m sounding frustrated.

    I’ve read this (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360) and it says to block a certain page I need to do this

    # To block a page, list the page.

    Disallow: /private_file.html

    Except I look on this page (http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages)
    and it says

    What Pages are Not:
    * Pages are not files. They are stored in your database just like Posts are.

    The thing I’m not understanding is that google says if I want to block a page I have to block a file. But then wordpress does not store it’s pages as files so there is an obvious problem there and I don’t know where to go from there.

    Sorry if I’m a total dummy but if I was just blocking a html file on the FTP I would be fine. My problem comes up because it says the page is stored in a database and isn’t an actual file. So I don’t know what URL to put to block that.

    P.S. Sorry if I sound frustrated, but I am and maybe it’s because I don’t understand how wordpress stores it’s files or whatever but I have been working on this for several hours just trying to get this one thing taken care of.

    it doesnt matter how wordpress stores files — theyre served, just like any other urls.

    http://www.domain.com/mypage

    is the same url .. whether or not wordpress creates it or not.

    you have a page, its name is thing. the permalink to it is http://www.mywordpress.com/thing

    what do you put in your robots.txt?

    Disallow: /thing/

    very simple.

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