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How to Protect Your Gated Content From Google Search

By Carly Stec

How to Protect Your Gated Content From Google Search

How_to_protect_your_gated_content_from_google_searchTo gate or not to gate, that is the question.

While we recommend we do everything in your power to get your blog content to rank higher on Google search engine results pages, it's important that you keep your premium content off.

Why?

You see, your premium content like ebooks, guides, and whitepapers is worth a bit more. 

Considering you've likely poured a bit more time and effort into these premium resources, you'll want to be sure that potential leads aren't getting their hands on them without filling out a form.

According to Google:

“You can put a noindex meta tag on a page, a noindex X-Robots-Tag in the header, password-protect that page, or return a 404 or 410 HTTP status code. After we recrawl the page, it will naturally drop out of our index after a while. If you need to urgently remove content, you can use our URL removal tool to request removal of URLs or cached pages from Google’s search results.” (Source: Google)

What this means for you:

For marketers, protecting your thank-you pages is not only recommended, it’s necessary if you wish to sustain your lead generating efforts.

If your thank-you pages are easily discoverable on search engine results pages, you’re missing out on opportunities to capture valuable contact information.

Essentially visitors will be able to access your lead generating offers without having to pass through the “gate” that visitors who come across the content via the corresponding landing page would.

While Google suggests including a noindex meta tag, or a noindex x-Robots-Tag, we’ve found that the first
option requires a lot less technical proficiency. Simply place this little snippet of code <META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex”> in the <head> section of your page’s HTML and you can rest assure that your thank-you pages will be safe and sound.

 

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Topics:

Search Engine Optimization
Published on July 19, 2014

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