Block eNotices from web searches

This article refers to our legacy product, eNotify, which will no longer be available and support for the product will be discontinued, effective August 1, 2023. For the best Finalsite experience, we recommend using our Finalsite Messages, which provides enhanced security and reliability for your school's email communication needs. Visit our client portal for additional information and next steps.

If you don't want users to find your eNotify archives in a web search, you can block search engines from indexing eNotify content by modifying a file on your site called "robots.txt." A “robot” is software that search engines use to index sites on the web.

The robots.txt file resides in the root directory of your site's server and is technically inaccessible, but Finalsite includes a text field that can be used to send updates to robots.txt. To make an edit (site administrators only):

1. Log into the site and edit the Domain Settings for your site. Hover over the blue Domain indicator above your site's home page and click the action menu to reveal the "Settings" menu item.

   

2. Click the "SEO" tab, and find the "Custom Robots.txt Content" field.

   

3. Or, on Page Manager, open the Site Manager menu and select Site Information, then scroll down to the "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Settings" controls.

4. Enter these two lines, as shown in the screenshot above:

   User-agent: *
Disallow: /cf_enotify/

All of the web pages automatically generated by eNotify reside in the /cf_enotify/ directory, so once this edit is saved, those pages will be invisible (or "disallowed") to search engines and therefore will not appear in search results on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.

Note that there may be some lag time between when you make this edit and when the desired results take effect. This is because sites are not indexed constantly but rather on a set schedule. You can log in to Google Webmaster Tools to force a re-indexing of your site on Google.com.

Note also that a single robots.txt file covers one domain only. If your site has subdomains (such as alumni.yoursite.com, or parents.yoursite.com), you may need additional robots.txt files to cover those subdomains. If this is the case, repeat the above procedure on each subdomain in Composer. (If you have subdomains and use Page Manager, please contact Finalsite Support.)

Also, this will only impact pages automatically generated by eNotify. If you create a page on your site and add an eNotify element to it to make an eNotify Archive page, you'll have to set that specific page to also be hidden from search engines on that page's settings menu.