Discourage search engines from specific blog pages

  • I currently have “Discourage search engines” ticked for my entire blog, but what I want is just to discourage search engines from indexing certain personal posts, whereas I would like the rest to be indexed, e.g. book reviews and posts about movies.

    If I add below code to the specific posts I do not want to be indexed, will it keep search engines out from those posts, so I can untick “discourage search engines” from the blog as a whole?

    <meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ />

    Thanks:-)

    My blog is History of Bad Parties.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • If you have a theme that allows for scripts in the header on a per-page basis, simply at this to the header script for that page:

    <meta name="robots" content="no index, no follow" />

    Assuming you don’t have this functionality in your theme, open up your robots.txt file located in your root directory for /historyofbadparties/.
    Currently, you have:

    User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 30

    Change it to:

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /blogpostnumber1/
Disallow: /year/month/day/blogpostnumber2

    Or whatever your permalink structure is set to for as many pages as you’d like.

    This will block Google from indexing that page. As a caveat, it may still appear in SERPs (search engine ranking positions) if other content is pointing to it.

    So if there are other backlinks out there (i.e. on Facebook, on other blogs) pointing to the pages you want out of Google, then you’ll want to eliminate them or use the Google URL Removal tool.

    Thread Starter A

    (@ag1024)

    Thank you very much for your reply.

    If you have a theme that allows for scripts in the header on a per-page basis, simply at this to the header script for that page:

    <meta name=”robots” content=”no index, no follow” />

    How do I know if it does? – How can I access the header of a post?

    What if I just dump the code into the start of a post, will that have any effect? (I always write in the html view, has WYSIWYG permanently disabled)

    I looked for the robots.txt file in my root directory and also in the WordPress admin editor, but haven’t found any file with a name that include anything with robots.

    As you can hear, I know nothing about web design.

    This will block Google from indexing that page. As a caveat, it may still appear in SERPs (search engine ranking positions) if other content is pointing to it.

    So if there are other backlinks out there (i.e. on Facebook, on other blogs) pointing to the pages you want out of Google, then you’ll want to eliminate them or use the Google URL Removal tool.

    There are, but that is OK. What I mainly want is prevent snippets of personal content displaying in Google searches (and other search engines) in somewhat irrelevant searches.

    It isn’t that I want to hide my posts, I just want to try filter the visibility through relevant contexts, be it person-driven (like readers or me sharing with their social media networks, or feeds) or topic-driven (like direct links based on topic relevance)… so that irrelevant visitors are less likely to stumble across personal content out of context.

    Thread Starter A

    (@ag1024)

    Ps. To my surprise, I do seem to get some traffic from Search despite having discouraged search engines, according to the referrers shown in Stats.

    How do I know if it does? – How can I access the header of a post?

    It most likely doesn’t; only premium frameworks (themes) allow for scripts to be installed on a per-page basis.

    Installing that code in your theme’s header.php will discourage search engine bots from indexing all of your website.

    Further, it’s never recommended to alter your theme’s core files. You should use a child theme and alter those files.

    What I mainly want is prevent snippets of personal content displaying in Google searches (and other search engines) in somewhat irrelevant searches.

    With an SEO plugin, like:
    – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
    – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/squirrly-seo/
    – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-seo/

    These are SEO plugins; they all basically do the same thing: help control meta data on your website. Choose one and install it.

    You’ll be able to control the meta data — in your case, the meta description, on each and every page. This is sometimes not beneficial to clients, but in your situation, I’d recommend it. Then you can control what the rich snippet that shows up in the SERPs is.

    Ps. To my surprise, I do seem to get some traffic from Search despite having discouraged search engines, according to the referrers shown in Stats.

    If you’re linked to by other sites, etc., those links will be indexed, and you’ll see yourself in SERPs; this is out of your control unless you use the manual method I mentioned above.

    Thread Starter A

    (@ag1024)

    Thank you for your advice… Yes, I don’t think my theme has that option. It is not premium and I didn’t find any.

    I’m a bit hesitant to install the SEO plugins. It looks like the exact opposite of what I want – although I see your point about controlling the snippets.

    (I’m quite negative to anything with “SEO” in it, the term has a ring of spamming, superficiality and sensationalism to it, and I avoid writing the word anywhere on my blog because it seems to attract crawlers/spam sites).

    Installing that code in your theme’s header.php will discourage search engine bots from indexing all of your website.

    WordPress has a tick-box that does that, and that is the one I currently have ticked until I find out how to selectively shield some posts from search engines.

    Thread Starter A

    (@ag1024)

    Thanks for the tips WebPrezence. It seems that the SEO plugin does indeed allow me to do what I want: disallow indexing of specific web pages.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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