How to fix these unwanted URLs?

[marknorman]

Right now i have wordpress, one page website, but google also show wp-content. KIndly check below in google.

site:http://baltimoreelite.com/

How I can fix this issue?

[Nishadha]

Hi Mark,

You need to tell crawlers to not to index those content by modifying the robots.txt file. Below is a good link with some examples and instructions

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17029811/how-to-set-up-robots-txt-file-for-wordpress

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Mark,

I block the same on my site (which is also a single page). Here is the content of my Robots.txt file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/
Sitemap: http://www.inetseo.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz

-Andy

[ThompsonPaul]

You have a much bigger problem than what can be solved just with a robots.txt file, Mark.

All of those URLs are showing up because of a misconfiguration of your theme installation (likely caused by the theme developer) is allowing full display of all of the content of each of those directories. In addition to polluting your search results, as you've noticed, it's a also a pretty major security risk. You can see this in action by going to http://baltimoreelite.com/wp-content/themes/sintia/wpv_theme/assets/css/ What should happen when you go to that URL is you see a blank page, or receive a 403-Forbidden warning. Instead, you're seeing a full listing of the directory contents - bad news.

Since I don't know your hosting configuration, the easiest way to fix this issue is to add a line to your .htaccess file at the root of your site. This should correct for all such instances, You need to add this line:

<code>Options -Indexes</code>

If you're not familiar, the .htaccess file is a text file which you can edit with any text editor. You'll need to use an FTP program or the file manager in your hosting control panel to access it at the root of your site. (You may also need to enable "show hidden files" in your program). I always recommend backing up the existing file before editing just in case. You'll add this new line on its own line with a blank line between it and any other lines in the file. It can go near or at the top of your htaccess file.

Now getting those URLs out of the search index is going to take a bit more work. You'll want to implement the robots.txt exclusions like Andy suggested, and then you'll need to go into Google Webmaster Tools and use the Remove URLs tool to specifically request removal of the directories you blocked with the robots.txt and that you also want removed from the search results. (The robots.txt is a critical part of this process, as Google requires it be in place in order to process the removal requests.)

This, combined with the htaccess edit mentioned above, should keep those URLs from showing up again in teh future.

Hope that all makes sense. If not, be sure to ask!

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

Andy and Nishada - don't forget... Adding robots.txt disallows will do nothing to get already indexed URLs out of the search index after the fact.

Paul

[marknorman]

This post is deleted!

[ThompsonPaul]

If I were you, Mark, I'd add it right at the top of your htaccess file. I'd also add in a descriptive comment to make the reason for the directive clear. So:

BEGIN Remove ability to read directory indexes

Options -Indexes

END Remove ability to read directory indexes

These lines would be inserted right at the top of the htaccess file. I would also warn though, that I've had situations where caching plugins have overwritten such directives when they update the htaccess themselves. If that happens, you man need to try inserting it after #END WPSuperCache and before # BEGIN WordPress.

Hope that works for you?

Paul

[marknorman]

Thank You Paul. All is well now.

[ThompsonPaul]

Great job, Mark! I can see from this end that nearly all of those unwanted URLs have already dropped out of the results. That's far quicker than even I expected! And the ones that aren't gone are leading to a 403 Forbidden page, which is great.

One last thing you can do if you want. Because you are on HostGator, they are displaying their custom 403 error page, which has their branding all over it (nasty, kinda ugly) You could create your own simple 403 error page, add your own basic branding to it, and for instance add a line that says something like "You don't have permission to view this page or it is blocked for security reasons. Drop by the home page [link to home page] to find what you're looking for, or to conduct a search."

This basic page can be used to replace the one that HostGator provides by default so any visitors that hit it by accident will still feel like they are on your site, and will have a suggestion for what to do next. Your hosting control panel will have instructions for how & where to provide your own custom error pages.

Hope that last little tweak's useful.

Paul