Post viewable by link-sharing only and non-indexed

I need to create a post that is hidden from our page and search, that is only viewable by sharing a link to it. Is this possible? Can anybody help me figure this out? Appreciate it!

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It’s possible, but be prepared to do some work.

Normally pages are not only web-visible at their own URL, but they also appear on index pages for related tags, on author pages, in the RSS feed for the site and in the “sitemap.xml” that’s generated for the site. To keep the page from getting found or indexed, it needs to be excluded from all these locations.

To implement this, you’d could create a private tag like #hideme, and then update the templates or code that generate the sitemap, the RSS feeds, the author pages and the tag index pages so they all exclude posts with the #hideme tag.

Depending on your use case, it could be a lot easier to make the content marked as “members only” and then tell your recipient how they can easily create an account. In that case, it would be visible to all other members as well.

If it’s just one or two people you want to send it to, perhaps just use the “Publish to Email” feature and just send the post directly to them as an HTML email.

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I think I accidentally found a way to do this:

  1. Write your post. Don’t publish it yet.
  2. Open the sidebar on the right and go to the “Email newsletter” section.
  3. Use the option to send a test email to yourself.
  4. In the email you receive, they’ll be a link to “View Online”
  5. Copy that link and share it!

I was somewhat surprised work for unpublished posts, but it appeared to work. (Unless it only worked because I was also logged in?).

Since the post was not “published”, it should not appear on any of the index pages, in the RSS feed or in the sitemap. Still, if someone puts the direct link on their website, the page could end up in search engine results that way.

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Thank you @markstos! The “email newsletter” section doesn’t appear for me, but I tried using the “preview link” without publishing, and that does seem to work in the same way. Going to fiddle with these options. Very much appreciate your help!

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