Keep your page out of search results
If you want to keep your page out of the search results, there are a number of things you can do. Most of them are not hard and you can implement these without a ton of technical knowledge. In this post, I won’t give you difficult options to go about this. I will simply tell you what steps to take and things to consider.
Why do you want to keep your page out of the search results?
It sounds like a simple question, but it’s not, really. Why do you want to keep your page out of the search results in the first place? If you don’t want that page indexed, perhaps you shouldn’t publish it? There are obvious reasons to keep for instance your internal search result pages out of Google’s search result pages or a "Thank you" page after an order or newsletter subscription that is of no use for other visitors. But when it comes to your actual, informative pages, there really should be a good reason to block these.
If you don’t have a good reason, just don’t write that page.
Private pages
If your website contains a section that is targeted at, for instance, an internal audience or a, so-called, extranet, you should consider offering that information password-protected. A section of your site that can only be reached after filling out login details won’t be indexed. Search engines simply have no way to log in and visit these pages.
Noindex your page
Like that aforementioned “Thank you”-page, there might be more pages like that which you want to block. And you might even have pages left after looking critically if some pages should be on your site anyway. The right way to keep a page out of the search results is to add a robots meta tag, which is exactly what slscart does.
Adding it to your page is simple: you need to add that tag to the <head>
section
of your page, in the source code. slscart will do this for you.
Noindex your page with slscart
In slscart, you have the option to noindex a page right from your editor.
In this example, I’ll use a screenshots from the slscart page editor.
How to keep your site out of the search results using slscart
For the page you want to modify, click the Edit button.
For Index Page: set to Yes to “Allow search engines to show this page in search results” or set that to "No" not to get this page indexed. Save the changes. Note the default is Yes.
The second option, Follow Link:, in the screenshot is about following the links on that page. That allows you to keep your page out of the search results, but follow links on that page as these (internal) links matter for the other pages. The default is Yes.
The last thing I want to mention here is: use with care. This robots meta setting will truly prevent a page from being indexed, unlike a robots.txt suggestion to leave a page out of the search result pages. Google might ignore the latter, triggered by a lot of inbound links to the page.