Preventing Landing Pages from Being Found via Search Engine

[RachelR-GTG]

We use landing pages to embed webinar replays that we only want to grant access to a certain group for viewing. Is there a way to make these landing pages only accessible by direct link and not searchable by any search engines?

[DionPereira]

This knowledge article from HubSpot explains it perfectly:
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/reports/how-do-i-block-pages-from-being-indexed-by-search-engines

[Ben_M · Accepted solution]

Just make sure to include the typical noindex line in your header and the search engines should stop indexing your page.  However, if the page is already indexed, this will not necessarily delist this so if the page is already indexed don't expect it to disappear because of this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

[RachelR-GTG]

I don't typically mess around with coding. Where is the best place to put that in HubSpot?

[Ben_M]

When you are editing a landing page click on Settings and then under Advanced Options look for Additional Code Snippets --> Head HTML.

[mondoec]

@Ben_M is there a way to accomplish this globally for all pages, instead of having to edit each page? We have updated the "Site header HTML" settings to include noindex,nofollow expecting that to work, but it is not being applied to any website or landing pages even though the appropopriate HubL variable is used on our page templates.

[Ben_M]

There is no global setting as this typically get inserted on each individual page. But if your template has the meta tags in it, I would see no reason you couldn't do this. I'm not sure what your reference to HubL code is though. This just needs to be in the HTML head of the template and if you don't want it editable there is no need for HubL around this code at all.

[mondoec]

@Ben_M okay in that case I must ask what the "Site header HTML" setting does? The descripton of that setting states "Add custom code snippets to the HTML head section across all of your pages." According to the HubL documentation (here) the required "standard_header_includes" page template variable should add "code added to the head tag at the domain/template/page level."

Additionally this knowledge base article states "You can also update your account settings to add code snippets to all pages and blog posts hosted on a specific domain." The only type of pages the Site header HTML would not be applied to are knowledge base articles.

Based on those two articles, my understanding is the code configured in that "Site header HTML" setting is set up at the domain level (since it can be configured individually per-domain) and should be applied to all pages using that domain. Although we have it configured as instructed, it is not working as described.

[Ben_M]

First, I would recommend posting this in a new discussion as posting in a thread that has already been resolved will likely prevent others from adding in comments as they may believe the thread to be resolved.

With regards to your questions, the HubL code you are referring to makes the basic inclusions and allows for users to enter in tracking code, etc. through the interface. What I had suggested was that you could hard code the meta tags into your document in addition to that HubL code if you want everything to be noindexed.

With regards to your question about the inclusion not working, it is difficult to say without seeing your code whether there are any errors that could be preventing the HubL inclusion from working as expected. For this you would need to share your code, submit a support ticket, or grant someone access into your instance to review the code to determine the root cause of why the meta tags are not publishing to your pages as intended.