Peggy Zhu (Customer) asked a question.
Hi everyone,
We're currently using Sitefinity CMS 15.4 and have a question regarding Sitefinity Forms and site search behaviour.
Environment Details
- Product Version: 15.4
- Build Version: 15.4.8625.0
- Product File Version: 15.4.8625.0
Our developers have added a Web Link field to all FAQ items. By populating this field with the URL of the page that contains the FAQ, users can see the page URL in the search results and click through to the relevant page.
We'd like to understand how this works when the linked page is set to noindex.
Scenario:
- An FAQ item has a Web Link pointing to a webpage.
- The webpage exists and is accessible to users.
- The webpage is set to noindex and therefore should not be indexed by external search engines such as Google.
Question: If a user searches for a keyword using the Sitefinity website search, will the FAQ still be returned in the website's search results because the FAQ content itself is indexed by Sitefinity?
At the same time, can we assume that the FAQ and its associated page will not appear in Google or other search engines because the target page is set to noindex?
In short, we're trying to understand whether:
- The FAQ remains searchable through the website's internal Sitefinity search.
- The FAQ and page remain hidden from external search engines due to the page being set to noindex.
Any clarification on how Sitefinity handles this scenario would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Hi Peggy,
The built-in search in Sitefinity (accessible from Administration -> Search Indexes) will not have search capabilities over the Web Link displayed on this page. As long as the page is configured to not allow internal search it won`t have the content displayed on it be searchable.
To be more descriptive the search option to disable the built-in search from crawling the page contents go to Title & Properties of a page and in "Advanced section" uncheck "Allow site search to index this page"
if you refer to the admin area search in the FAQ module itself