Hi @willemb2
Unfortunately, our content permissions feature does not include protecting the content from search engines. It only protects the content in the browser. To stop search engines from crawling pages you could follow the steps from this article: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-stop-search-engines-from-crawling-a-wordpress-site/
Best
We do not want to stop the crawlers in general. We’ve used Yoast in the past to prevent crawling of individual pages, but that was unreliable.
When I access a restricted post when not logged in and look at the source I find the content that the Bing crawler is using in <meta property="og:title" and <meta property="og:description". Wouldn’t it be possible to suppress those tags for resctricted posts and pages?
To remove this meta from protected posts you will need to find it in the template file and wrap it with condition:
if ( ! members_has_post_permissions() ) { ?>
<meta property="og:title" />
<meta property="og:description" />
<?php }
This will display this meta only for in non restricted posts.
I hope that helps.
Amazing. While I was still gathering courage to try what @caseproof suggested above, Bing apparently decided to stop showing the contents from the og:description property in their search results. They still show the title, which can be found in other metadata as well, not only og:title. And they show the author, like Google does.
In the meantime I learned that og: comes from Open Graph, a protocol developed bij Facebook. I found a setting in our Avada theme to disable that. I don’t trust anything from Meta.
We’re currently looking at plugins that will add something like
meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"
to restricted posts.
Here is the one of the most popular plugins for SEO: https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Best
