HELP! How To Block A Page From SE's & Public View

blog pages, block download pages,

[Love2Blog]

Hello,

I need to know how to block a page on a Wordpress site where I have a download link from search engine indexing and access to the public?

This is a .htm page created in Cpanel that is only meant to be seen by subscribers to my list because it has the download link to a bonus for sign up.

I know about the "no index no follow head tag", but I have seen this ignored by SE's and other crawlers at times.

The url of this page will be sent in auto responders to subscribers and so they should be able to access it, BUT no one else should have access.

How can I do this? (keep in mind my tech knowledge is limited)

Thanks

[lucy24]

Preliminary questions:

Do you care if other random people (including search-engine robots) know that the page exists, so long as they can't physically get there?

Have you ever set foot in your htaccess file? (If the answer is not unambiguously yes, then the answer is no.)

[not2easy]

If you are not familiar with editing your htaccess file, use the WP settings. To have access to all the settings, it is easier if you're using a decent SEO plugin that lets you tell WP not to add a page to the sitemap and lets you set a robots meta tag per page

Then the fastest, easiest way to do that would be to put the information from that .htm page into a WP page so that you can check the box to make it password only, then send the password with the auto response - or manually. Set the page to noindex, nofollow and keep it out of your sitemap. Get rid of the .htm page created in CPanel. You may want to change the password frequently so it does not get shared.

[Love2Blog]

Preliminary questions:

Do you care if other random people (including search-engine robots) know that the page exists, so long as they can't physically get there?

Have you ever set foot in your htaccess file? (If the answer is not unambiguously yes, then the answer is no.)

Thank you

1. Yes I do care, I would rather no one could see it unless they receive the link to it in my auto responder.

2. Yes, have edited htaccess a lot BUT only with coding given to me by a plugin or block bots codes given by coders.

[jeroenwaning]

have you added it to your robots.txt?

[jeroenwaning]

if it is set to "noindex" then search engine bots won't crawl it or index it

[mhansen]

If all your efforts can be done away with by one person sharing the link in a forum somewhere, it's going to be harder to manage.

Have you considered adding a plugin, or using a third party service to manage the download? How about your auto-responder, do they offer that option? MailChimp and others can handle an encrypted link within their own servers.

MH

[lucy24]

if it is set to "noindex" then search engine bots won't crawl it or index it

Half right. The "noindex" label means don't index. But they can only see the "noindex" (or equivalent header directive) if they do crawl.

That's why I started out asking whether it matters if people know the page exists. Knowing it's there and being able to get there are different things.

[Love2Blog]

Thank you everyone, I have solved this issue

[aakk9999]

Thank you everyone, I have solved this issue

It would be nice to know what did you do, so that the others who have the same or the similar issue can consider your solution.