A lot of people have been asking me how I hide or exclude pages from my WordPress navigation menu so that they don’t show up when people visit the site.
Its pretty easy so I thought I would make a quick tutorial video to show you how.
Why would you want to do this?
The main reason for doing this is because you might have your free eBook giveaway located on a WordPress page. Obviously you don’t want that to be in your menu otherwise no one would subscribe because they can just get it from there!
Another reason might be because you have a landing page or squeeze page set up that you only want visible when people arrive through the correct channels. For example, if you have an advertisement placed on another site somewhere directing people back to your product, you might want them to go to a custom made page as opposed to just a homepage.
This is a really cool little feature to know if you want to publish content but not have it seen by everyone right away.
Any requests?
I know I know… its been a while since I’ve done a video. If you have any requests for tutorials just drop me a comment and I’ll try to make it happen.
Thanks for explaining this. You definitely want to hide your exclusive content and only give access to your subscribers.
Taking it further, I wonder if there’s a way to encrypt the URL? So that people can’t just copy the URL and share it with their friends. If the URL is randomly, dynamically generated each time the page loads, then people wouldn’t be able to do that. I know of plugins to cloak the affiliate links within your pages and posts, but not of the page URL itself.
Should you also write a rule on your robots.txt file to keep search engines from indexing your hidden pages? Otherwise, people could possibly do a search to find your hidden pages.
On the flip side, listing those hidden pages on your robots.txt file can backfire. Bots sent out by hackers might use your robots.txt file as a “hit list” of what pages they’ll want to target the most. A robots.txt file tells them which pages you think are the most valuable on your site, since you’re hiding them.
By the way, when did you create the resource page for “Build a Blog Worth $50,000”? I honestly never noticed it until watching your video. I thought, “Oh, Blog Tyrant is working on something new.” Like it was still in development. When I exited the video to return to your blog, I realized that you’d already created it. What a great guide! I appreciated that you wrote it in a way where it all flows together, instead of just recycling your old blog posts.
Smart idea to do it as a “live” page, that you can keep updating and adding to it. I remember subscribing to John Chow’s newsletter to get his old ebook, “Make Money Online.” While still worth reading, it’s a re-hash of his blog posts. So it can be repetitive and outdated in some parts. I noticed he’s now giving away a new ebook instead.
I think a live page will help you avoid having the content “age” like John Chow’s first e-book did.
(Small typo in the “Important” paragraph of your blog guide though: “itself.” Can’t help but notice, I have an English degree. Ha ha.)
I’ll have to ask you the name of your favorite Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. I love good Chinese food.
Hey Marcus.
Thanks for the great comment.
And thank you for the kind words on the $50,000 guide. It took a fair while to write but every time I thought I was getting to the end I thought about new things to add.
I’m still not sure if its simple enough for those starting out?
@Marcus, about the robots.txt.
It doesn´t matter, remember you can set a meta tag in the page itself to disallow bots to index it´s content. So, you don´t expose to hackers that “maybe” set you in a hit-list. Haha 🙂
But then again, if somebody really want to unblock something, it´s a guarantee that they gonna make it.
By the way, I´m trying the plugin right now. Thanks.
Thanks for clearing that up. I completely forgot about the “no index, nofollow” meta tag!
I just checked that the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast includes the ability to set posts to no index and no follow.
Instructions for anyone who wants to do this:
1) When you’re writing a post or page, scroll down to the WordPress SEO settings.
2) Click on the “Advanced” tab. The first two options are to set the “Meta Robots Index” and “Meta Robots Follow.”
3) Click on “Noindex” and “Nofollow.”
Yoast has more information on his WordPress SEO plugin in his blog. I’ve linked to the section where he explains Robots Meta Configuration:
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#robots-meta
Extra security to hide your pages from the search engines, as well as people.
Pretty popular plugin that one. Does a lot of cool stuff.
I just find a plugin that can hide a WP menu link for logged-out or logged-in users.
This is useful if your current theme use the new Menu admin interface to display navigation links.
*The plugin only control the menus, not the pages visibility. Use in combo with the one in the video.
http://wpsmith.net/wordpress-plugins/wp-custom-menu-filter-plugin
Nice work Julio. That is a cool one!
BT, Thanks for this tip. It was very useful and timely for me. I have to confess that I am slightly bedazzled by the comments, mainly because I am fairly clueless about bots and hackers. Can you shed any light on the mentioned issues?
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Its pretty advanced stuff that I’m not really sure is necessary.
A lot of SEO’s think that no-indexing any page is a bad idea.