Prevent Indexing WordPress Page

  • nutis

    (@nutis)


    12 years, 3 months ago

    How to prevent my site from indexing content (e.g. by Google) before the site is fully ready? I know the WordPress offers some functionality for this, but is it really reliable? If this functionality is turned on, can happen that when the robot comes to my site which is not ready and see this settings is turned on, will he come back some other time or just index this site as “never come again”?
    Is it also useful to use any of “Maintenance” plugin that shows maintenance page when accessing the site?
    I just need to build my site online and allow robots to index it after some time. What is the best approach to do so? Thank you very much!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • C W (VYSO)

    (@cyril-washbrook)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    The discourage indexing option does a couple of key things to stop search engines from indexing your site:

    (1) It adds the following to your website header:

    <meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

    (2) It causes hits to robots.txt to return the following:

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /

    In short, these are standard methods and should reliably prevent search engines from indexing your site.

    Whether you want to use a maintenance plugin is up to you. The discourage indexing option hides your site from search indexes, but clearly won’t hide the site from a person who knows your site URL. If you want to make certain that no-one except a logged-in user can see your site, then yes, use a maintenance plugin.

    Thread Starter nutis

    (@nutis)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Thank you for your reply.

    If I turn the setting on then, do I need to do anything else like creating some special “.txt” files on my server or this is not necessary? (robots.txt)

    And if the indexing is disabled with this setting and then turned off, will the search engines in some other time (how long does it take?) start indexing it again to get the content?

    Thanks in advance.

    C W (VYSO)

    (@cyril-washbrook)

    12 years, 3 months ago

    (1) No.

    (2) Search engines may visit your site, but they should not index the site as long as the box is ticked. When you are ready for the site to be indexed, untick the box.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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