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Hiding linked pdfs from search index

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Hi

I have set up a number of pages that need to be hidden from search engines. These pages have links to pdf files (stored in the File Manager). I have used the "exclude from nav", and "exclude from search index" attributes to hide the page but when the client was doing a search this morning on Google a link to one of the pdf files in the File manager appeared. Is there an additional attribute I need to use or something I should set in the file manager to hide this pdf from Google?

best regards
Cameron
 
PatrickCassidy replied on at Permalink Reply
PatrickCassidy
I don't know if this will help, but the most certain way to hide a PDF file from a search engine is to compress it in a ZIP folder. People who sell ebooks online usually do this because Google can't search for ZIP folders or know the content of them.

Hope it helps you out, if not a temporary solution for now.

~ Patrick
hutman replied on at Permalink Reply
hutman
We had this same thing happen. It's on an older site pre 5.6 so there's no log of when permissions changed, it's possible (though unlikely) that the permissions were set to public temporarily, but we don't think so.

It appears as if the page is set to administrators only, but is not set to exclude sitemap.xml. However, it doesn't actually appear in sitemap.xml. The page itself that the PDFs were linked to does not appear to show up in the search index, either, only the PDFs.

The PDFs have now been removed so that the links from google don't work any more, but google still has cached versions of the files you can see.

We'd like to know if it's possible for google to index pages or follow links on them that are restricted by permissions. Is there any way to test this?