We are developing a WordPress site, where the user will be able to create their own pages, which will display info related to the website’s function.
The user will be able to set the page to either public or private. If the page is set to public, the page will appear as links elsewhere on the website, so everyone can access it. If it’s set to private (similar to youtube’s unlisted videos), only the ones with the link will be able to access it, but the link to it won’t appear anywhere else on the site. The user can at any time switch between public or private.
Now, what we want to achieve is, that if the user sets the page to private, it won’t be displayed in results on search engines as well. We came to this corner case:
- User sets the page to public.
- Some time passes, so the page is indexed in the search engines, and shows up in search results.
- User decides to set the page private
Now, the issue here is that sure – the link to the page won’t appear on our website, but it will still come up in search results, because it is indexed.
What we have thought about is that when it is private, we would simply dynamically set a noindex robots meta tag, but this would take a bit before it is removed from search results.
We checked other stack overflow questions that could possibly be related to our issue, such as this or this, as well as checked the official google dev documentation, but didn’t get any more insight.
Is there anything else that we could do to possibly come around this issue? Since it’s data that could be very important to users, we want to make it as such that it instantly “disappears” from all search results the moment they decide to put it private.
