Is it possible to exclude pages from being published?

[iannicholson]

Hi All,

Sometimes I need to duplicate a page and modify it, but not publish it.

For example, I might have a sales page for my film class, but modify that page for seasonal offers (e.g. Father's Day discount, Christmas offers etc).

So, I will take my original sales page - sales.htm - back-up/duplicate it to sales-1.htm, and modify the original sales.htm to include the offer details.

Then, when the offer is over, I rename sales.htm to sales-Xmas.htm, and rename the sales-1.htm back to sales.htm. (BTW, I get that links in menus etc can get changed, so my menu always refers to the full URL of my sales page).

So I want to keep that page for next year, but I don't want to publish it.

Here's my question...

Is there some simple switch I am missing somewhere that turns a page's publishing on or off? If not, can we please have one?

I'd like to turn off publishing for the Xmas.htm so it doesn't get uploaded and possibly appear in Google.

[gwpriester]

Just don't link to the page.

[iannicholson]

Thanks Garry for the quick reply.

True, not linking to the page (and I don't) reduces the risk of the page being found, but Google still manages to find and index them, which is not good.

It would be real nice if WD had a simple feature to turn off publishing for any given page. It would make sense to add it to the Web Properties->Page - a simple checkbox 'Publish this page' which is defaulted 'on' would be perfect!

[siran]

Maybe a litte crude, but if your sever is apache you can try giving you page a filename starting with ".ht" e.g. ".htdummy01". That would still publish it but Google (and no one else) should not be able to read it.

[Egg Bramhill]

...but Google still manages to find and index them

In your robot.txt exclude unwanted pages via:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory/file.html

[Acorn]

Copy your design file (.xar / .web). Keep the original safe.
Change the required page and republish.
After the sale's over, republish the original.

You then have a record of what you offered and when, which in a trading situation must be rather important.

Acorn

[nazf355]

Copy your design file (.xar / .web). Keep the original safe.
Change the required page and republish.
After the sale's over, republish the original.

You then have a record of what you offered and when, which in a trading situation must be rather important.

Acorn

This is definitely the way to go. Every other method that uploads the page will get indexed by someone, regardless of if you have a robots file or not.

[Acorn]

This is definitely the way to go. Every other method that uploads the page will get indexed by someone, regardless of if you have a robots file or not.

Thanks for the endorsement. It worries me when sites are dealing with transactions as the lack of a history makes it awkward to prove what the contract was.

It costs nothing these days with the Cloud to save off design file versions.

Acorn

[restless]

This has always worked for me:

Put this code into the Head (before the </head>):

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

I have been using that ever since somebody told me about it more than 10 years ago, and none of the pages have been indexed by the search engines - at least I have never seen any of them show up on searches, and nobody has indicated that they found any of them on a search.

Ed

[Acorn]

This has always worked for me:
Put this code into the Head (before the </head>):
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
I have been using that ever since somebody told me about it more than 10 years ago, and none of the pages have been indexed by the search engines - at least I have never seen any of them show up on searches, and nobody has indicated that they found any of them on a search.
Ed

Ed, while this is useful, however, the OP was twofold; stop it being published & stop it being found. The former is the more safe as then it cannot necessarily be found. Having the page(s) still in the design can affect NavBars so it is simpler to remove the design page itself. Google does not guarantee this will happen and there are other search engines with different handling / policy:

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

Acorn