Keeping Google spiders away from a page

  • i have a few pages on my site that I don’t want anyone to have access to unless I give them the direct URL. On my old FrontPage site, if a page wasn’t connected to the chain from the home page, it wasn’t crawled and I was safe. I assumed WP would work the same way, but to my shock, Googling a phrase that is on a page not connected to any menus brought up that page!

    I don’t know what Google is doing with WP that allows it to spider to pages on a site that are not hooked in any way to menus, but how do i tell the webcrawlers like Google to not crawl a given page?

    And is there anything I can do to make those Google hits go away, other than hope future crawlings won’t hit those pages after I implement whatever you suggest? Some private info is now visible on Google even before one clicks through…just based on the three lines that show up in the search.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    you can “noindex” those pages using a plugin like Yoast SEO and go to Google Webmaster Tools to remove the URLs from Google’s index.

    Thread Starter miloshapiro

    (@miloshapiro)

    I already had Yoast set up and did not know it could do that; thank you and that part is now done, I believe. I do have Google Webmaster tools, but it’s a big thing (and I’m a little non-techy). Can you guide me in how to go into GWT and tell it to stop showing that page?

    Moderator Steven Stern (sterndata)

    (@sterndata)

    Volunteer Forum Moderator

    Google “remove URL from index google webmaster tools” ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Keeping Google spiders away from a page’ is closed to new replies.