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How to make search engines go away?

Started by rivilian, February 24, 2017, 03:36:40 PM

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rivilian

Pretty nooby here. Send me to a different place if I've entered the wrong door.

I wish to use SMF for some collaborative work among a number of designers/writers, the ultimate result to be publication in a public forum/website. BEFORE that time, however, we'd like our cussin' and discussin' kept away from search engines.

Advice on how to do this? Robots.txt file the way to go? If not, then what?

Or, if robots.txt is the way to go, where does the file go? In the public-html directory? The root directory for the domain? The directory which contains the SMF forum installation?

This noob doesn't know. Can you help?


Jailer

Make the forum private until your ready go live with it. If guests (bots) can't see your forum they can't index it.

rivilian

Make the forum private until your ready go live with it.

And, this is a setting within the SMF configuration? I'm still digging through that, and perhaps I haven't noticed the setting yet.

Kindred

Yes. Turn off guest access in features and settings
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