Prevent Selected WordPress Content From Appearing In Search Results
Do this quick test on your WordPress site. Go to your site’s search box and enter a key phrase that you think is likely to pull up results of pages that aren’t meant for public consumption.
For example, on this site, we used to give away the 180 Free Tools List. So I’d want to search for “180 free tools” on my site. Check your search results. Are your download pages showing up and more important – are they accessible?
Oh no! Our confirmation pages are showing.
Here’s another test. Searching your site again, enter some random keyword that will produce no results. For example, I typed “Veggie Tales” into my site. Something I know has never been written about on this site.
Now, look at the page. What you should expect is a message informing people there were no results. If that’s the only thing on the no results page, great!
However, some themes also display links to categories, archives and may even suggest results or list posts from a certain category. Do these friendly suggestions include the download pages to your products or freebies?
Theme that display with links when no matches returned
If so you’d want to fix that. So far, I like the Simply Exclude plugin. Not only does it have quite a number of options but I do love the ability to exclude or include posts or pages directly from the list of posts/pages. This saves me from opening each post I want to exclude.
Exclude page/post from list of posts
Also, you can exclude these pages or posts from RSS which is always so very easy to overlook. Finally, Simply Exclude can also exclude by post type where you can further customize where you want to exclude them, for example, on searches, RSS feeds, home/front page or archives.
Besides the plugin, another way you can remove items you don’t want is to tweak the search results template.
If you’re worried you’ve been giving away your paid content, do this exercise now. This is one of those things that is probably a good idea to add to your Quarterly or Half-yearly to-do list.
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Great tip, as always Lynette! Didn’t you recently write a post about monthly, quarterly and yearly ‘check ups” we should do for our blogs? My memory isn’t as good as it used to be, and I can’t find it! 😉
Hey StephanieTrahd ! So good to see you here again. Hhm… did I do something like that? I really can’t remember but in any case, that would make good content huh. You got it. This is going into my to-write list.
This is great! I have some hidden pages that I made for people when they sign up for the email list, and the problem was that people couldn’t always reach them. So I had to make them “unprivate”, which is not good . Now I can use this plugin! Yeah.
Hm – I can’t get this to work on my site. I’m using the Elle theme on the Genesis platform. I have a download page for subscribers. I usually hide these by using Fantasos for all downloads. But this page is being accessed from a mobile app and I wanted it as simple as possible.
I’m testing using this: MyDomain.com/lllll
Of course, the page does not exist, but it’s still showing up on my error 404 page, which is produced by the Genesis system. Could that be the problem?
Hi GailMetcalf, it very well might be. Some themes have coding to output related posts. I don’t use that theme. Now you got me curious. Yes, I’m the type who cannot resist a challenge 🙂
LChandler GailMetcalf … so – I installed a similar plugin and got the same results. Then I went to StudioPress and discovered they have a 404 plugin to override the theme. I would have preferred to use yours because it’s simpler! At least I’m not showing my dl page.
Thanks for a great post.