Don't miss out Virtual Happy Hour this Friday (April 26).

Try our conversational search powered by Generative AI!

Ben Nitti
Oct 6, 2021
  2821
(1 votes)

How to exclude pages from your search index, sitemaps and internet search engines

Your client wants to exclude certain pages from showiing up in your site's search results, they also want prevent these pages from being crawled by external search engines (Google, Bing etc.) and lastly they want them removed from their sitemap.xml file.  All of this can be achieved and controlled with a checkbox property on the Settings tab in the editor. I'll demonstrate below. 

Create an interface with a boolean property that inherits IContent

	public interface IDisableIndexing : IContent
	{
		bool DisableIndex { get; set; }
	}

Add it to your base class or any page type 

    public abstract class SitePageData : PageData, IDisableIndex
    {
        [CultureSpecific]
		[Display(Name = "Disable Indexing",
			Description = "Removes the page from search index, sitemap and search engines",
			GroupName = SystemTabNames.Settings,
			Order = 10)]
		public virtual bool DisableIndex { get; set; }
    }

Optimizely Search & Navigation

You can filter  from your Optimizely Search & Navigation search index by creating a module dependency class for your search conventions (this where IContent is implemented)

	[ModuleDependency(typeof(IndexingModule))]
	public class FindConventionsInitialization : IInitializableModule
	{
		public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context)
		{
			var client = SearchClient.Instance;
			ContentIndexer.Instance.Conventions.ForInstancesOf<IHasDisableIndex>().ShouldIndex(x => !x.DisableIndex);
		}

		public void Uninitialize(InitializationEngine context) { }
	}

External Search Engines

Use the same boolean property to add instructions for search robots from the <head></head> element in your layout view

<head>
    @if (Model.DisableIndex)
    {
		<meta name="ROBOTS" content="noindex, nofollow" />
    }
</head>

Sitemaps

If you're using the Geta Sitemap generator you can extend it and filter these pages from being added to when the xml file is being generated. Create a class that inherits from the abstract base SitemapXmlGenerator class and interface ICommerceAndStandardSitemapXmlGenerator. Override the AddFilteredContentElement method and from there you can exlude the pages with IDisableIndex.  

    public class CommerceAndStandardSitemapXmlGenerator : SitemapXmlGenerator, ICommerceAndStandardSitemapXmlGenerator
	{
		public CommerceAndStandardSitemapXmlGenerator(
			ISitemapRepository sitemapRepository, 
			IContentRepository contentRepository, 
			UrlResolver urlResolver, 
			ISiteDefinitionRepository siteDefinitionRepository, 
			ILanguageBranchRepository languageBranchRepository, 
			IContentFilter contentFilter) 
			: base(sitemapRepository,  contentRepository, urlResolver, siteDefinitionRepository, languageBranchRepository, contentFilter)
		{
		}

		//Filter content from xml sitemap
		protected override void AddFilteredContentElement(CurrentLanguageContent languageContentInfo, IList<XElement> xmlElements)
		{
			var sitemapContent = languageContentInfo.Content as IHasDisableIndex;

			if (sitemapContent != null && sitemapContent.DisableIndex)
			{
				return;
			}

			base.AddFilteredContentElement(languageContentInfo, xmlElements);
		}
	}
Oct 06, 2021

Comments

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Solving the mystery of high memory usage

Sometimes, my work is easy, the problem could be resolved with one look (when I’m lucky enough to look at where it needs to be looked, just like th...

Quan Mai | Apr 22, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Search & Navigation reporting improvements

From version 16.1.0 there are some updates on the statistics pages: Add pagination to search phrase list Allows choosing a custom date range to get...

Phong | Apr 22, 2024

Optimizely and the never-ending story of the missing globe!

I've worked with Optimizely CMS for 14 years, and there are two things I'm obsessed with: Link validation and the globe that keeps disappearing on...

Tomas Hensrud Gulla | Apr 18, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Visitor Groups Usage Report For Optimizely CMS 12

This add-on offers detailed information on how visitor groups are used and how effective they are within Optimizely CMS. Editors can monitor and...

Adnan Zameer | Apr 18, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Azure AI Language – Abstractive Summarisation in Optimizely CMS

In this article, I show how the abstraction summarisation feature provided by the Azure AI Language platform, can be used within Optimizely CMS to...

Anil Patel | Apr 18, 2024 | Syndicated blog

Fix your Search & Navigation (Find) indexing job, please

Once upon a time, a colleague asked me to look into a customer database with weird spikes in database log usage. (You might start to wonder why I a...

Quan Mai | Apr 17, 2024 | Syndicated blog