restrict google to certain author posts?

Try it with this in your theme’s functions.php if you don’t have any other plugins that add robots meta tags:

add_action('wp_head', 'restrict_author');
function restrict_author() {

  $restricted_author_ids = array(18,24);

  if(is_single() || is_page()){ // single posts, pages
    global $post;
    if(isset($post->post_author) && (in_array($post->post_author, $restricted_author_ids))){
      echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">'."\n";
    }

  }

  if(is_author($restricted_author_ids )) { // author archive page
    echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">'."\n";
  }

}

Change the author IDs to the correct author IDs in:

$restricted_author_ids = array(18,24);

cheers, where do i get author ids from?

Go to wp-admin > Users > All Users and click on a user (author) you want to exclude. In the address bar of your browser you will see something similar to this

/user-edit.php?user_id=9&wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fusers.php

The user id is the number after ‘user_id=’.

The results of this will probably be visible after google has crawled your website.

Check the source code of your website to see if the code is only added on the single posts, pages and author pages that you want to exclude.

how can I change the code so i can exclude a certain google bot?? ie i want to exclude the google news bot to certain posts