Weebly. How to Hide a Website from Search Engines
As any mature website builder, Weebly provides tools to hide a website from search engines. There’re three ways to do this. The two do the job directly (“Hide site from search engines” switch and Header Code injection) in a way search engines expect, and one indirectly (Site Password settings).
Let’s see how to do this.
Prevent a site from being indexed with SEO settings
- Go to the Website / Edit Site section on the left side bar
- Click on the Edit button
- Go to the website Settings
- Go to the SEO settings
- Switch on Hide site from search engines
- Save and Publish
Prevent a site from being indexed with Header Code injection
Before starting web page indexing, a search engine bot looks into the <head /> block because it contains the page metadata.
Since we aim to prevent indexing of the entire website, every single page head block must include a dedicated <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag.
Important! This method might get conflict with the one above. Choose either one of them to avoid potential problems.
If you want to learn more about this topic, read the Block Search indexing with noindex article by Google Search Central.
Here’re 6 easy steps to do this:
- Go to the Website / Edit Site section on the left side bar
- Click on the Edit button
- Go to the website Settings
- Go to the SEO settings
- Put this meta tag
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">into the Header Code editor area - Save and Publish
Prevent a site from being indexed with Site Password settings
Unlike the previous methods, this one works implicitly because the primary intent of this feature is to restrict access to a website for a certain category of users.
Everyone who tries to open a website must have a password. As a result, search engine bots cannot crawl and index the website due to a lack of rights.
Follow these steps to configure it:
- Go to the Website / Edit Site section on the left side bar
- Click on the Edit button
- Go to the website Settings
- Go to the General settings
- Enter the password
- Save and Publish
Summary
There are three ways of hiding a Weebly website from search engines, and all take a little effort to implement. Just a few minutes of work with settings.
It is worth using either the first method (Hide site from search engines switch) or the second (Header Code injection) to do this properly. Why? Because their primary purpose is to prevent a website from being indexed in a way that search engines expect.
If you end up with the third one (Site Password settings), it would be a good move to additionally utilize one of the first two methods to explicitly “say” to search engines that your website should not be indexed. Otherwise, not doing this might hurt your website’s SEO if you decide to index again.