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[Closed] How to make my forum fully private, and not indexing by google?

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Sofy
Posts: 4308
 Sofy
Admin
(@sofy)
Support Team
Joined: 6 years ago

Hi @kzdev,

I'd suggest you read Robert's answer in this support topic:

https://wpforo.com/community/how-to-and-troubleshooting-2/how-can-i-actually-make-my-forum-truly-private/#post-21748

This support topic also should be helpful, please check it out: 

https://wpforo.com/community/how-to-and-troubleshooting-2/how-can-i-swtich-off-the-xml-sitemap/paged/2/

Posts: 281
(@crisw)
Reputable Member
Joined: 6 years ago
Posted by: kzdev

Thank you for your responses, According to your suggestions, now I use login for every user and I also set the 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site' box.

But trully I am still feel a little bit unsafe for my personal informations. I hope those configurations be enouth to keep safe my forum privacy

Hi @kzdev . My suggestion was 

 

Posted by: CrisW

Hi @kzdev In addition to the above suggestion, you can also go to your

  1. WordPress Dashboard,
  2. Settings,
  3. Reading
  4. At the bottom of the page, you will see
  5. Search Engine Visibility
  6. Check the box - Discourage search engines from indexing this site
    (It is up to search engines to honor this request).
  7. Click Save changes button.

 Hope that helps.  Good luck and God bless you. 🙂 

 

It is not a guarantee that everything will be kept private, as anything we post online these days can actually get compromised or hacked into by either hackers, or other tech people who has "Super Admin" access to any website (like Webhosting Companies managing the servers, or Network Administrators, or System Admins, or Database Admins). 

The Forum (or any forum) can be kept private from prying eyes, through "Membership and Permissions settings", but just know that there are also other systems (like Webhosting companies who own the "servers" where our websites are located) that can access everything in our domain, if they choose to

So it's just something that Forum Admins need to know too, and be aware of. 

Good luck!    

Posts: 5
(@afflospark)
Active Member
Joined: 5 years ago

Solutions provided by mCutting and CrisW is really appricieated. 

But we can also do it by just 2 lines of code without any headache.

Have you heard of the two Top Level files ".htaccess" and "robots.txt"

both files stay in the top-level directory of your website.
these are the optional files if they are not there default settings will work.
You can create these files and magic will start happening by overwriting the default value with the written one.

.htaccess file is used for apache configuration settings. for eg: if you want to enable directory listing, or if you want to redirect a URL to another, etc.
You can follow this article if you want to know more about .htaccess file and how to edit it in WordPress

https://www.experthoot.com/edit-wordpress-htaccess-file/

Another one is robots.txt
this file is used to list the URLs of a website for a crawler(google bot, bing bots, etc)
when Google bot comes to crawl your website, first it reads robots.txt file and if you deny robots from here, no robot will access your website & nothing will be indexed by Google.

you have to write this code in robots.txt file to stop every bot(including Google) to crawl your website

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

To hide an individual page from crawling you can use this code

User-agent: *
Disallow: /page-name

Thanks

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