If you are involved in your SEO efforts consistently, at some point, you may have the requirement to hide a website and make sure that it doesn’t get indexed. You may have several reasons to do so. However, the primary reason is that you usually want to have a strong SEO strategy.

In this article, you will learn the common reasons why website owners hide their websites or content from search engines. You will also learn some simple and effective ways to hide a website:

Why Hide a Website?

Website in Development

Perhaps you think it’s time for you to update or rethink the design of your website. This can take a lot of time and effort. As a website owner, the sole purpose of your wanting to redevelop your website is to attract more visitors and rank higher in the search engines.

Hence, the logical course is to hide your website from getting indexed by the search engine when it’s in the development process, as you don’t want visitors to find an incomplete or awkward website.

You can check out this video if you want to redesign your website like a pro.

How to redesign a website?

You Have a Valid Reason for Duplicating Your Content

Generally, it is a good idea to have original content and not duplicate your content. However, at times, you may be required to duplicate it. If the search engines crawl your duplicated website content, your SEO ranking can suffer.

You Have Private Content

If you have content that you would like to keep private, then it makes sense to hide a website from search engines. Then, in case anyone needs access to your website, you can provide them with a link.

You can rely on robots exclusion standard and authentication scheme to protect your content. Apart from private content, most website owners like to hide their login pages, thank you pages, subscription form pages, and internal search results from the SERPs.

Simple Tips on How to Hide a Website

Use the robots.txt file

This is one of the most widely used and easiest ways that you can hide your website from search engines. You should be able to find it at the root of your website. It will have a simple file with no HTML.

You can have sections within this file and mention the names of the bots that you think shouldn’t index your websites. Sitemap: is another great alternative to robots.txt. Make sure you are well-versed with the latest Google guidelines and changes when using the robots.txt file. 

Check out this video to learn how to create robot.txt and the best practices for using it.

Steps to create a robots.txt file

Block Your Website From Indexing With This Meta Tag

Another great way to block your website from getting indexed is to use noindex robots meta tags on the pages. Although this won’t stop the crawler from crawling your website, your website will not be indexed. Another advantage of using this method is that the users won’t be able to see the meta tag, and they will have a satisfactory page viewing experience.

Why use noindex robots meta tags

Use Password Protection

Password protection is quite common in the realm of the Internet. It is used to prevent data from being stolen or manipulated. This is typically done through the use of CAPTCHAS. It is also an excellent way to ensure that search engines don’t gain access to your content.

Use Pig Latin

Pig Latin is a smart and coded mode of communication that can come in very handy. Surprisingly, most search engines are not designed to translate and understand Pig Latin. Hence, they will not index the websites which contain this language. If you’d like to hide your content or website, you can encode your content in Pig Latin and keep it that way for as long as you require.

Customization of IP Addresses or Ranges

Another simple and time-saving trick is to customize your IP addresses or ranges. Many top-rated search engines typically crawl from a certain number of IP ranges. This is also a good way to limit your bandwidth consumption.

Include Form Submissions in Your Website

Another smart way to prevent search engines from indexing your website is to include HTML forms. Search engines are completely incapable of submitting HTML forms. However, keep in mind that this method comes with its own demerits.

In case the people in your niche notice and appreciate your content and start using your web pages as a reference, the search engines will be unable to notice your authoritative presence and rank you higher. Hence, this method should be used carefully.

How to add form submission on a website?

Use Text in Images

Text in Images is a neat trick that will help you get the information across and still keep your content hidden from the search engines. Hence, you will essentially have zero word count.

However, keep in mind that this method is best reserved for special circumstances. You will not find success with this method when it comes to smartphones and screen readers.

You can check this out, if you want to add text to images online.

How to add text to images?

To Sum Up

These are just some of the many methods available. It is highly recommended that you be fully familiar with the guidelines of the different search engines and understand how they operate exactly. This will help you find different ways to hide your website or content from them effectively.