How do I prevent the uploaded files from being found on Google and accessed without being logged in? I just found out that even though I set the restrictions to only registered members to have access to the forum, you still could see some of the topics without being logged in. Which was weird in itself. But I managed to fix that by making the shortlink a restricted page in Wordpress. But now if I search for members of my organization in google, I can find an uploaded xls-file that contains everyone’s personal information. Without having access to the forum. Can anyone help me?
You can stop search engines indexing your attachments using a simple command in robots.txt file of your website root directory. Just put these links in the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/wpforo/default_attachments/
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads/wpforo/attachments/
More info in this article:
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/website/how-to-block-search-engines-using-robotstxt
Thank you for the reply. Can I stop search engines indexing the whole forum this way as well?
But I understand that, even if I use this solution, if you have the link you can still access it without being a member? That's what I find so strange. As it contains personal info like addresses and phone numbers I don't want anyone other than members to access it.
Thank you for the reply. Can I stop search engines indexing the whole forum this way as well?
Yes, you can.
But I understand that, even if I use this solution, if you have the link you can still access it without being a member? That's what I find so strange. As it contains personal info like addresses and phone numbers I don't want anyone other than members to access it.
Please show one example of private topic that can be accessible for guests. There is no way to access to well configured private topics, or topics of private forums.
So I tried the stop indexing thing, created a robots.txt with the code in it. But it stills shows up in Google. I deleted my cookies, thinking that might be the thing that made it still show up, and even used another browser, but it's still there...
Google is not interactive. Images are not removed live-time (real-time). You should request google to remove them or wait for a while.
I removed the files that showed up in Google and sent a request for removal, as it can't be accessed by clicking it, but is still viewable in the cache. Only thing that still won't work is removing it from the Google Search.
But the fact remains that if I have the link to a file on the forum, I can get access to it, even when I'm not logged in.
But the fact remains that if I have the link to a file on the forum, I can get access to it, even when I'm not logged in.
Nobody knows the name of your attachments. It's not an easy task to find even one single image URL.