Question: Hide from lists and menus

[kgroneman]

Question:  If you check the "Hide from lists and menus" box for a node, does that have any effect on search engine crawling?   In other words, can I still find posts in Google if a forum has that box checked?

My guess is "yes", but want to know defnitively.   Thanks. - Kim

[lilim · Accepted solution]

Yes, content within "hidden" nodes will still be indexed.

[Parshant]

@kgroneman

If you hide the boards it will still show up in Google search.
Things you don't want to crawl from hidden categories and boards, you need to go into the user permissions of the category or board, and change the default user permissions for "See categories" or "Read Posts" to deny.
This will prevent data from crawling the board.

If you want this to be remove immediately from the search, after blocking the permission visit Google Webmaster tool to remove the URL's which are already indexed.

[lilim]

You can also create a custom component with meta tags that includes noindex, add the component to a custom page quilt for whatever the interaction style is in question, and then apply the page layout in Production when you want to block the node from being crawled.

This is the process we have in place so that closed user groups aren't found via Google.

[kgroneman]

Thanks all.  You've answered my question.  I just wanted to be sure.   A previous admin on our site created a board that was supposed to be private by just hiding it.  

[Fellsteruk]

I know you got an answer already but you can also add url's to your robot.txt file to prevent being crawled. this is done in stage. 

[kgroneman]

This begs an expanded criteria to my orignal question.  If I have a group that's hidden AND marked as "closed", will that be hidden from search engines?   I assume yes since anyone/anything has to login and be a member to view, but again, just verifying as I don't know. 

[lilim]

The content will be hidden, but a search engine could still index that the user group exists. This is the same use case we were encountering when we implemented the meta tag workaround.

[kgroneman]

As long as the content can't be indexed, that's good enough for our use case.   Thanks.