How to Make Sure a Joomla Page is Private

Often you have pages on your website that you want to keep private - either for your staff or for you registered members.

This week we'll walk you through how to keep search engine bots from indexing certain articles.

Method #1

1. In your Joomla Admin panel, go to Content >> Article Manager and open the article you wish to keep private.
2. On the right-hand side under "Parameters (Article)" you will see a field labled "Access Level".
3. If you set this to "Registered" then only people at the "Registered" user level and above will be able to see the article.
4. If you set this to "Special" then only people at the "Author" user level and above will be able to see the article.

Method #2

1. In your Joomla Admin panel, go to Content >> Article Manager and open the article you wish to keep private.
2. On the right-hand side under "Metadata Information" you will see a field labled "Robots".
3. You can write "noindex" into this box and search engines should recognize that this page should not be indexed

To verify that this has worked, visit the secret page on the front of your site and click "View Source" in your browser. If everything has worked correctly you should be able to see a line in the code looking like this:

< meta name="robots" content="nofollow" / >

(we've added spaces around the < and > signs so you can see the code)