Excluding from search

Three separate settings keep a page out of the three places it can be found, all in the page's sidebar. They are independent — set the ones you need.

• Search exclude — leaves the page out of the site's own search results. Visitors can still open it from a menu or a link.

  

  The Search exclude field
• Simple XML sitemap — set the page's sitemap inclusion to Exclude so it is not listed in the sitemap that search engines read.

• Meta tags → Advanced → Robots — tick noindex to ask search engines not to index the page even if they find it, and nofollow to stop them following its links. This is the one that actually removes a page from Google over time.

Typical uses: a page that only makes sense reached from another page (a thank-you page, a step in a process), a landing page for a campaign that has finished, or a page kept for reference that should not be discoverable. For content that should not be public at all, none of these is enough — unpublish or archive it instead; see Hiding content.

Changes take effect on the site immediately; search engines catch up on their own schedule, typically days.