Preventing direct access to subpages
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I have a public site with some additional pages related to family geneology that was not visible until my site was crawled by a search engine. Now these pages now show up in search results. I am trying to find a solution that prevents direct access to these pages from search results unless you use the ‘search’ feature on my homepage to search for the family member’s page. If you are a family member, you know to do this, if you are a member of the public it would not be evident that these pages exist. Is there a way to prevent direct access to these pages unless you are coming from the main homepage (and then directly searching for the specific page)? I know there are account management solutions, I am trying to avoid the administration overhead and headache and looking for more easier solution. Thank you in advance for any suggestions!
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In addition to what esmi has said, you can put REQUESTS into your “robots.txt” file that search engines NOT index certain pages. Notice that it is a request, it is up to the search engine to honor it, but respectable ones do. You should subscribe your site to google webmaster management, this will let you see how you are being indexed and when. Putting requests into robots.txt should have the effect of the indexing that has been done being reversed.
As an aside it is necessary to be cautious in telling the world what not to index, since the robots.txt file is world readable, during the time of George Bush’s whitehouse their robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov drew attention to all sorts of content that they didn’t want indexed, which made them especially interesting.
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