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I have a page I want to share with specific group of users. I'm thinking the best way to keep it exclusive is to keep it out of search results.

Any ideas or suggestions?

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2 Answers 2

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If you set this in the <head> to stop any search engines crawling it <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

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  • This is what I would do.
    – CreateSean
    Dec 19, 2012 at 23:03
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You can use EE's native template access permissions to restrict access to a template to members of one or more member groups.

You can configure this on a per template basis via the template manager in the Control Panel. You can set a template to redirect requests for that template to if they do not come from a logged in member of a permitted group (to a login page, say).

Relying on robots.txt/meta robots is not a good idea as it relies on search engines honnoring your intent. There is no way of enforcing/ensuring that they do so with this method.

If you need per entry control, or member level control rather than at the member group level, then have a look at the (commercial but very reasonably priced) Entry Access add on.

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    I would say that this answer definitely has merit, but to be thorough, I’d end up using both it and the methods presented by @since1976 . There’s no reason to not have it setup correctly and securely.
    – Christopher Kennedy
    Dec 19, 2012 at 22:48
  • This solution assumes the reason why you're preventing pages from being crawled is because they're member-only. There are many, many types of publicly facing pages that shouldn't be crawled; for those, the meta tag is the way to go.
    – Nick Benson
    Dec 20, 2012 at 15:04
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    I inferred that from the fact that the OP said "a specific group of users", rather than purely "out of search results". Meta-robots is basically just an honor system, not all search engines respect it, though granted all the major ones do.
    – Tom Davies
    Dec 20, 2012 at 15:06
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    I'm with @Tom Davies on this one. We've been dealing with spiders and bots not respecting the robots.txt and no index settings on a client site and while Google, Yahoo, and probably Bing mostly follow the rules, a number of crawlers just don't. If you don't want the page to end up in search, don't make it publicly viewable, which means limiting access members or member groups.
    – nonprofit_tech
    Dec 20, 2012 at 15:47

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