Ben Nitti
Oct 6, 2021
  6132
(2 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
Optimizely Opal: How to Build Effective Workflow Agents

If you're building workflow agents in Optimizely Opal, this post covers how specialized agents pass context to each other, why keeping agents small...

Andre | May 20, 2026

ReviewPR: An Azure Function That Reviews Your Azure DevOps Pull Requests With Claude

A while back I wrote about an  Azure Function App for PDF creation that we use to offload PDF rendering from our Optimizely DXP site. That same...

KennyG | May 19, 2026

Accelerating Optimizely CMS and Commerce upgrades with agentic AI (Part 2 of 2)

The Real Transformation in Optimizely CMS 13: Why the Upgrade Itself Is the Easy Part. A field-tested playbook for enterprise teams moving from...

Hung Le Hoang | May 18, 2026

Is the most powerful AI model really the best value?

Artificial Intelligence is already becoming part of everyday software development. Developers now use AI tools to generate code, write documentatio...

K Khan | May 16, 2026