Can private pages be indexed by search engines?

  • Hi everybody,

    Does anybody know if ‘private’ pages can be indexed? Are they viewable by bots or not at all? Is there a way to make them so?

    If not, does anybody know of a better way of restricting access to a WP powered website while still maintaining its ability to be crawled by search engines?

    Thanks!
    S

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Moderator Samuel Wood (Otto)

    (@otto42)

    www.remarpro.com Admin

    If the page can be seen by anybody with a web browser, then yes, a search engine can see it too.

    Hi Sam07,

    welcome to the wordpress support forums. The feature you are asking about is not possible because any user can look like a searchegine robot and vice-versa.

    There might be faulty assumptions that lead to the thought that so called cloaking is possible. If you think it is, I would suggest you start to search for a wordpress cloaking plugin.

    Thread Starter sam07

    (@sam07)

    Thanks guys!

    Just want to point out that
    #1: cloaking is bad practice, search engines (e.g. Google) will penalize site that cloaks
    #2: search engine will make a cache version of the page, accessible to any one with Internet connection. You can aovid this with a no-cache meta tag.

    The bottom line is, as stated above, cloaking IS bad practice.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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