hiding website pages from search engines

  • Unknown's avatar
    oddlyactive · Member ·

    Hi –
    I’ve been posting a poem each day for just under a year as a personal project and always intended to delete the whole lot at the project’s end. Now realised that deleting the pages leaves them still visible to search engines and results in horrible ‘404 error’ message if links are followed.
    How can I hide / remove individual pages (or a category if easier) so they’re effectively ‘invisible’ to search engine bots?

    NOTE: The website is a free personal wordpressdotcom account – I do not have options to use plugins or for custom CSS

    Thanks

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    Hi there, you can bulk edit your posts or pages in the WP Admin dashboard. If that is for your above site at https://lovely2cu.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php for posts and https://lovely2cu.wordpress.com//wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page

    Check the box next to the post or page that you want to make private (only you will see it) and then in the drop down menu at the top of the column, select Bulk Edit and then the Apply button. Then under Status, change those post to Private and click the Update button.
    https://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/edit-pages-screen/
    https://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/edit-posts-screen/

    This will remove those posts and pages from public view and out of search engines. Do know, however, that if those posts and pages are already cached by a search engine, it will take around 4-6 weeks for your site to be recrawled and reindexed. You can sometimes speed up this process by submitting your sitemap to Google, etc. https://en.support.wordpress.com/search-engines/

    Hope that helps.

  • Unknown's avatar
    oddlyactive · Member ·

    Thanks Jennifer –

    I’ve changed status on one post to ‘host and admins’ as ‘private’ not in the drop down, but I think it’s effectively the same thing. Can probably live with the 4-6 week reindexing thing and will test the water from time to time in the interim. There’s a small handful i want to ‘hide’ immediately but I can pick away at the other 300 or so as and when. I wish I’d thought of this beforehand, ‘cos I could have made making the previous week’s posts private part of my coming week’s scheduling programme! :D

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