Is there a straightforward way to hide your blog from Google?

I know on WordPress there’s an option to hide from Google and in my ghost blog there’s an option to password protect the site. But I’m looking for a straightforward way to hide my site so it won’t pop up readily in Google’s search results.

Do I need to do this some old fashioned way or is there some ghost blog specific way to do this?

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The standard for preventing search engines from indexing your site is the <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> tag. If you add that inside the <head> element in your theme’s layouts then it will apply to all of the pages on your site.

You can also restrict search engines crawling your site with the standard robots.txt file. With Ghost, you can place the file in the top-level directory of your theme so that it’s served at https://yoursite.com/robots.txt.

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@bigbird just for me, may I ask why you want your Website invisible for Google?

Thank you very much for the help :slight_smile:

You know how you can create an unpublic video on YouTube that’s still available to anyone who has the link to it? It’s like that.

Sometimes I want to share a link that’s easy to get to but I also don’t want that same link to become popular because it appears in search results.

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@bigbird thanks for the Explanation, now I got it. :wink:

If you’re looking for something like this, I think the post preview feature would serve you well.

Instead of publishing the post, leave it as a draft. In the Post Settings Menu, click preview. You should be linked to something like https://your.blog/p/{unique-id} - that link will always point to the latest draft of the post, but will be rendered using your theme. These pages are blocked from google by default as well, so you don’t have to worry about adding it in manually :)

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Well that is an interesting solution to the problem. Thanks for sharing it.

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