Site visibility settings determine who can see your site.
When your new site is created, visibility will be set to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” This helps keep your site out of search engine results until you are ready. Note that this option does not block access to your site – it is up to search engines to honor your request.
Make your site ‘live’
Your site is already live, in that someone with the URL can visit it. But the site is not likely to show up in search results until you change your visibility settings. We recommend doing this when you would like the general public to be able to find your site.
To allow search engines to index your site:
- Log in as an administrator.
- From the dashboard, go to Settings > Reading
- Scroll down to Visibility
- Select “Allow search engines to index this site”
- Click Save Changes
Make your site private (password protection)
If you don’t want the general public to find your site, and you don’t want users with only the URL to be able to view the site, you can limit visibility with password protection.
You can choose one of four private viewing options instead of the above (note that these options will prevent search engines from indexing your pages):
- Only registered users of University of California, San Diego (Requires AD credentials).
- Only registered users of this site can view it. See Managing Users
- Only admin users of this site can view it.
- Only someone who provides a specified password can view this site (you provide the password).
See Campus Press’ documentation on Change Privacy Settings for more details on these options, and examples for when they are appropriate.