make use of submitting a site map with pages that are and  aren't available in your navigation via webmaster tools?

Hi David,

In umbraco you have a property called "umbracoNaviHide" which enables you to hide a Node from either a navigation or any sub navigation or folder depending on what you are trying to achieve.

However when you set the value to "True" the url of the page is still active and its only when you "Unpublish" a node that you lost the url and search. This is where you will get your 404 error page.

So in any case hiding a Node will still make the page searchable to google or yahoo.

//fuji

Fuji... But if the googlebot has no way of getting to the page via a link on the site..... then it won't get to the page even if it does serve if you know the url?

Not sure to be honest Mike. But with google analytic in the template it would right?

//fuji

My turn to not be sure if the analytics feed into search results... (and you would have to personally hit the page, as your end users still can't get to it either if no links to it on your site ;-) to generate analytics.)

I do know that the google site map submission of an xml file is the way that we have always done this sort of thing... for instance when the only entry point into a section is a search.... google won't get to any of the products in the search cataloge.... so you create a sitemap to include all the product pages that the search could get to.

Thanks a lot Fuji and Mike for your comments!

A combination of these two should solve my problem hopefully:

"In umbraco you have a property called "umbracoNaviHide" which enables you to hide a Node from either a navigation or any sub navigation or folder depending on what you are trying to achieve.

However when you set the value to "True" the url of the page is still active and its only when you "Unpublish" a node that you lost the url and search. This is where you will get your 404 error page.

So in any case hiding a Node will still make the page searchable to google or yahoo."

And:

Fuji, where do I find the property "umbracoNaviHide"?

Thanks

David

Hi David,

In your Document Type just add a New Property with Alias "umbracoNaviHide" with Type "True/False".

This should get you working.

//fuji

Hi David,

Here are two different/additional suggestions I can make:

First, make sure you have absolutely NO links in your site going to the page you wish to have hidden. (Using the umbracoNaviHide is one start to this process.) My suggestion though is a free program called Xenu's Link Sleuth that I highly recommend (and use all the time!) which you can point at your site and it will spider/crawl the entire site, which is not only great for identifying 404's, but also will let you know if your secret page was ever found.

Second, just in case a search engine does somehow stumble across your hidden page (for example, a link from someone else's site!), you can add a "noindex/nofollow" directive to the head of the document as follows:

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

I do NOT recommend using the /robots.txt file to hide this page, since malicious spiders/bots WILL crawl these pages that you are telling them not to. The tage above is a fail-safe for the honest bots out there.

The best approach in the end, however, if you really want to keep a page "hidden", is to use authentication and not serve the page unless you are authorized to do so. Umbraco has this functionality built into it for you to use.

Best of luck to you!

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