Anonymous

#9258

Is it a good idea to to block the search engines from returning results for my admin pages like privacy policy, terns and conditions, affiliate disclosure, etc?

I don’t really like these coming up in search results. What is the norm or best practice for this and would I include it in my robots.txt? And where is that located?

[Mod]

Kenneth John Odle

#43166

There is no best practice as far as coding, but I think if you google most companies, those basic pages do come up in their search results.

I always tell my clients that that at a minimum, they should include an “About” page and a “Contact” page to increase their appearance of legitimacy. Whether or not you want privacy policy, etc., to show is a business decision you have to make based on the nature of your business. Would people want to find out about your privacy policy, etc?

Your robots.txt file goes in your root directory. If you set WordPress to discourage search engines from indexing your site, it will actually create one for you.

You can learn everything you need to know about robots.txt files from http://www.robotstxt.org/

Keep in mind that search engines are under no obligation whatsoever to pay attention to your robots.txt file, although most of the big ones do.