I noticed that some of my Bricks templates are being indexed and receiving traffic. I tried setting the visibility of these templates to Private, but that made them inaccessible for use on the front end. I can see that I can set them to no-index, but the live URLs will still be there. What is the best way to deactivate the URLs while keeping the templates available for use in pages and to display posts?
Example page: Hazley Builders - Architect-Led Remodeling in West Chester
I’m using Metabox and Rankmath Pro, if that makes any difference.
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unless you add the templates to the sitemap and allow search bots to see the URL list there is no way any bot to randomly find and discover template pages.
BUT I do agree we need a solution. Maybe on default this pages can have no-index on < head > that would help.
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If you’re using RankMath, make sure that the template post-type (it’ll show up as “My Templates” in the Sitemap Settings) isn’t being added to the sitemap.
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Thanks. This seems like the best solution I’ve seen. I still don’t like the idea of live URLs with my templates, even if they are not indexed, but maybe this is the best I can do for now.
one extra thing to check, in the Bricks settings, are your Templates set to be public?
Clicking on the first template link you shared looks like it redirects to the homepage, so I think you should be good on that end. You might check in the Google Search Console to make sure that they’re not indexed/removed there.
