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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?

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. 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. 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. Dec 20, 2012 at 15:47

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