How to exclude a WordPress Page from Google Search?

Updated on August 6, 2019 By Sijal Shrestha On WordPress Tips and Tricks, WordPress Tutorials

Testing your website and its components can be quite crucial. Now for this purpose, you can use a test web page to try out various contents, new test features, and more. Alternatively, you might require a more secure website. Using a webpage visible to only authorized people services multiple needs; whether it be testing requirements or something required for your privacy. Thus, you should ensure that these pages stay hidden. That is, it is unable to be viewed by your website viewers and Google search. Doing so requires you to exclude a WordPress page from Google search.

Excluding a WordPress page from Google search or no-index-ing a Page from WordPress essentially ensures that your webpage doesn’t show up in Google search results or is never scanned by Google crawlers. This not only hides your content but also makes it so that the SEO score of your website doesn’t fall due to this webpage. Effectively, you are provided with a clean slate to mess around. One that has no effect on your site’s SEO whatsoever using a no-index WordPress page.

So how do we no-index a page from WordPress then? Well for one, we can decide to use the robots.txt file where you can add in instructions to exclude the page from Search engine bots. While this is a useful measure, it isn’t exactly easy to use for WordPress beginners. This requires editing the robots.txt file on your WordPress root directory which might be a bit troublesome for a WordPress beginner.

As so, Beautiful Themes brings you this guide on How to Exclude a WordPress page from Google Search, which makes use of dedicated plugins that allow you to exclude a page straight using the Yoast SEO. Before we dive into the demo, let’s take a look at some alternatives.

How to Exclude a WordPress Page from Google Search by Password protecting a page

One of the simplest ways of excluding a webpage from Google search is by simply adding password protection to the page or post. This simply blocks any user or bot from viewing the webpage. This way, only users with the password can view the webpage, and this effectively hides your page from Google search.

Now, this step requires to change the visibility of your page/posts from Public or Private to password protected.

Thus, you’ll be required to change the visibility on your WordPress post/page by opening them first in your dashboard. Next, click on the Status and Visibility section of the sidebar of the editor and refer to the Visibility option. You can choose to change it from Public to Private or Password protected. Choose Password Protected and choose any password that you feel fit. Once you save your posts, you should be done. Now, your WordPress should be excluded from Google search.

How to Exclude a WordPress Page from Google Search using WordPress plugins

You can also use the Yoast SEO plugin to no-index a page from Google search too. We highly recommend this method as it is very simple and effective and this way you don’t have to restrict your page using password protection. This is quite a nifty method of excluding a WordPress page from Google search if you want users to test some page on your website without it affecting your SEO scores.

So to start it off, you’ll be required to install the Yoast SEO plugin. If you don’t have it installed and have no idea how to do so, we highly recommend you check out this article. Once you’ve successfully installed the Yoast SEO plugin, we can safely proceed.

Excluding A WordPress Page using Yoast SEO

In order to use this feature, you will have to use the Advanced security options for Yoast. This is usually on by default. However, in the off chance that it is disabled for authors, you can choose to enable it too.

For this, click on the Yoast listing on the WordPress admin panel.

Next, click on the Features tab and scroll down to find the listing named ‘Security: no advanced settings for authors.’ Click on enable under this listing, and you should be ready to go. Do make sure that only site administrators can change these settings.

Next, open the post or page you want to exclude from Google search.

To no-index a WordPress page from Search engines, simply scroll down to the SEO section of the page. Here, click on the advanced tab to show the advanced SEO settings.

Next, refer to the option titled “Allow Search Engines to show this post in Search Results.” Change this option to ‘No’ and that should exclude the WordPress page from Google search results.

Congratulations, this post or page should now be successfully excluded from Google search results.

Concluding:

Thus following any of these guides, you will be able to exclude a WordPress page from Google search results. Experiment and test tons of site features without it ever dropping SEO results for your website. Alternatively, you can also choose to enable tons of other features to help your Google SEO score too. Why don’t you check out some of our other articles on these topics?