Hide entire squarespace site from search engines

Site URL: https://www.smartcoolingsolutions.com/

Hi,

I would like to hide my entire squarespace website from search engines like google and bing, not just specific pages of the website.

Is there a way to do it?

Thanks in advance.

No. The only way to hide a site on SS is not publish it on SS.

1 hour ago, interstellarhaze said:

I would like to hide my entire squarespace website from search engines like google and bing, not just specific pages of the website.

You can temporarily hide a site during the build process by setting Site Availability to Private or Password Protected. For more information see Publishing or hiding your site.

Perhaps I misunderstood your question because it would be very unusual to want to hide a website indefinitely. Can you explain what you are trying to achieve?

41 minutes ago, paul2009 said:

You can temporarily hide a site during the build process by setting Site Availability to Private or Password Protected. For more information see Publishing or hiding your site.

Perhaps I misunderstood your question because it would be very unusual to want to hide a website indefinitely. Can you explain what you are trying to achieve?

Hi,

You did not misunderstand the question. I wish to have the website accessible without a password, but I want to share the website only with specific people/organisations. I have an active interest in not being available through search engines.

Thanks.

I added the line, but I notice something weird when opening the drop down menu. Briefly I see the line I added appear on the top left corner of the page. Please check the screenshot. 

It appears that you've entered the tag twice. One is formatted properly. The other is not.

Remove this text.

meta name="robots" content="noindex"

Keep this tag paul2009 provided.

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

Let us know how it goes.

13 hours ago, creedon said:

It appears that you've entered the tag twice. One is formatted properly. The other is not.

Remove this text.

meta name="robots" content="noindex"

Keep this tag paul2009 provided.

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

Let us know how it goes.

Yes  found it. The wrong line I had added through the home page advanced menu. Solved now, thanks.

Hi there,

This thread was helpful, thanks Paul & Creedon. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post a follow up question but was hoping you might see it.

I want to try your advice and I'm curious how long it would take for my site to disappear from google search entirely?

If I re-enabled the Crawling in, say, 3-9 months, would it be reasonable to hope that the site would be restored on Google Search?  It's a portfolio site that just competes for my unique full name.

I ask because I want to temporarily use an image on my homepage, but I don't want it to appear in Google forever. I haven't uploaded the photo yet so it hasn't been crawled.

Curious if you know workarounds to block the URL of the photo from Google search? I've already read Help and reached out to Customer support, and I think my options so far are below.

Thank you for any insight you'd be willing to provide.

Halie

Potential options:

1. Hide my entire site from search results. Then re-enable when I put up the final photograph that I don't mind being crawled. I'm just worried that my site SEO will be forever scorched. A little disappearing for a few months is totally fine though. 

2. Create a hidden webpage that's not the homepage, just make it look like a homepage and put the image there. Share that page directly with people as a "work in progress homepage." 

3. Put the image on the public homepage but do some kind of URL blocking on the Google side?? Would need to learn more about that...  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?sjid=11711422244368323563-NC

2 hours ago, Halie2 said:

I want to temporarily use an image on my homepage, but I don't want it to appear in Google forever.

The meta tag should do the trick. Keeping in mind that when you add this tag, there is no guarantee that any search engine will honor the tag. If you want the tag to take effect site wide add it to Website > Pages > Website Tools > Code Injection > HEADER.

Quote

how long it would take for my site to disappear from google search entirely?

There is no official timeline of how content ages out of any search engine. With Google there is a way to request Google to remove pages. I don't recall if you can request a whole site be deindexed.

Quote

Curious if you know workarounds to block the URL of the photo from Google search?

The one most powerful feature that a website can use to control access to URLs is the robots.txt file. SS does not allow users access to this file as it is an arcane web feature and to easy for most folks to get wrong and mess up the whole site being indexed correctly.

So you are left with work arounds to try to address the issue.

On 12/28/2023 at 2:53 PM, creedon said:

The meta tag should do the trick. Keeping in mind that when you add this tag, there is no guarantee that any search engine will honor the tag. If you want the tag to take effect site wide add it to Website > Pages > Website Tools > Code Injection > HEADER.

creedon, thank you so much for your kind reply. To confirm, when you say "the meta tag should do the trick," do you mean adding 

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

to the homepage? Any chance you could point me to the right place on the homepage to add it? My understanding was that we can't add that to a homepage, only *other* individual pages or the entire site (which I'm worried could mess up search results etc etc.). 

Thank you for the information!

10 hours ago, Halie2 said:

do you mean adding to the homepage? Any chance you could point me to the right place on the homepage to add it? My understanding was that we can't add that to a homepage

The home page of your site is a page like any other page on the site. Click on the gear icon and then put the meta tag in Advanced > Page Header Code Injection.

Let us know how it goes.

Thank you, will do.