Hide pages from search and navigation

Composer pages can be hidden from navigation menus, internal site search, and external search engines independently, each via a checkbox in Page Settings. This article covers all three options and notes the timing constraint on external search engine hiding.

đź’ˇQuick answers

  • Hiding a page from navigation menus? Open Page Settings (gear icon) > General tab, and enable Hide from navigation elements. The page stays accessible via direct URL and site search.
  • What do the diagonal gray lines on a page name in Composer mean? The page is hidden from navigation. The diagonal lines are a visual indicator only visible in the Composer admin tree.
  • Hiding a page from internal site search? On the General tab, enable Hide from internal site search.
  • Can pages be hidden from Google and other external search engines? Yes. Enable Hide from external search engines on the General tab. Apply this before search engines crawl the page; otherwise wait for the next crawl for the change to take effect.

In this article


Hide from navigation

In order to hide a page from navigation, click on the pink gear icon to bring up that page’s Page Settings. On the General tab, enable the checkbox labeled “Hide from navigation elements.”

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Once published, the page will no longer appear in navigation menus or navigation elements and will only be accessible via the direct link or search.

Within Composer, pages hidden from navigation will display diagonal gray lines across the page title.

Page with gray lines hidden from navigation in Composer.png

Hide from internal site search

To prevent a page from being accessed via the search tool on your site, enable the checkbox labeled “Hide from internal site search.”

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Hide from external search engines

To prevent a page from being found by external search engines, enable the “Hide from external search engines” checkbox.

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Important Note

This setting is dependent on the robots from Google and other search engines crawling your site, so it’s best to enable this setting as soon as you create the page - before Google has a chance to crawl it. If the page has already been included in the search index, you’ll have to wait for the next time robots crawl your site for the change to take effect.

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