18 April 2014, 3:28

Hello,

At Pace University, we have a student who originally had her pages set to public, but now changed it to private.  Her personal information (her address from her resume page) is still showing up in a basic Google search.  Is there a way to hide this from Google and other search engine crawlers?

20 April 2014, 16:08

Hi,

As Google indexed the page while it was public the only way to get the information removed would be to deal with Google directly.

Thier policy about content removal is quite strict though.

Their is nothing built into mahara to stop Google from indexing a page when it is set to be public.

The only other option could be to remove personal content from page, make it public again, let Google re-index it, and then make it private again and put back personal information.

Cheers

Robert

22 April 2014, 3:27

Thank you so much for your response.  This is very helpful!

30 April 2014, 17:25

If you want to block all student-created content from being indexed by search engines, you could probably accomplish that with a robots.txt file ( see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en ). I think you could cover all the student content, while still making the front page indexable, by putting this in your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /view/
Disallow: /user/
Disallow: /interaction/

Cheers,

Aaron