Is Your Opt-In-Box Exclusive Training Being Stolen?

Protecting Your Opt-In-Box Training Using the NoIndex Tag!

Do you ever wonder if the exclusive training that you offer through your email list is being read or viewed by people that didn’t sign up for it through your opt-in-box? If you didn’t protect your training material when you created and put it on the web, then most likely it is in the index database of Google, Yahoo or any other search-engine index for anybody to find?

Let me give you an example… who knows the the ever popular and highly successful online marketer Katie Freiling? For those of you who don’t know Katie, she is the genius creator of the Unified Tribe. The Unified Tribe is a bunch of like-minded blogging entrepreneurs in a community to where they all have the opportunity to share your content with the click of a button, which is a very unique opportunity to drive MASSIVE traffic to your blog.

The Unified Tribe will be explained in detail in another article to follow soon. For now there is a banner of Katie on my sidebar directly below my ‘Categories’ menu which is a click-able link to an introduction page for the Unified Tribe.

When I first starting blogging back in June, I took some online marketing training from Katie by submitting my name and email address in to the opt in box on her blog. When I received her training through my email, the link went to a page on her blog site, which is excluded from the public eye.

For the purpose of this article, I thought I’d check to see if her training is in the index database of Google and Yahoo. When I did a search for a couple of her URL links that lead to her exclusive video training, I came up with results showing that her link, along with her information, were in the index database of both of these major search-engines!

What this means is that a person doing a search could find her training in the Search-Engine Results Pages (SERPs), by total accident (or on purpose), and click on the link to her training video without signing up for it.

If I were to guess, I believe that Katie would like to keep control of who views her training videos that she has offered through her Opt-In-Box email list. For those that aren’t familiar with it… a person can make a healthy living through the building of their ‘List’ in which the person relies on people signing up through their opt in box.

For those that are curious, I have already let Katie know that her exclusive video training series is showing up in the Google and Yahoo Search Engine Results Pages!

Is Your Training Indexed for Anybody to Find!

To check and see if your blog training is in the Google and/or Yahoo index, follow the instructions below.

Let’s start with Yahoo… Visit the following Yahoo site, then put the address of the page that you are checking in to the Search bar, click the ‘Explore URL’ button… if your page shows up in the results, then it has been indexed allowing people to click on the link and visit your training without your knowledge. See the example below:

Now let’s check the Google index database… visit Google and type in the Search bar “Site:” followed by the website page URL that you are checking. If you show results, then the page is in the Google index for people to find.

NoIndex Attribute, the Solution to the Opt-In-Box, Indexed Dilemma!

The solution to this problem is to have the pages that you would like to keep control over, protected by a “NoIndex” attribute attached to the page. This noindex tag tells the search engines that you don’t want this particular page in their index database.

There is a plug-in that will allow you to add the no index attribute to any page you choose. This is a WordPress-based plug-in called Robots Meta. What this plug-in will do for you is allow you to add the appropriate meta robots tag to your pages telling the search-engine spiders to not crawl and index this page.

Once you upload and activate your robots meta plug-in, you will find a box in your ‘Edit Page’ sidebar as shown in the photo below to where you can add the noindex, nofollow attribute.

After you have ticked the noindex, nofollow in your robots meta box for your training page, click on the ‘Update’ button to save. If you would like to see that your page now has the noindex attribute in its code for the search-engine to read, you can look at the HTML source code in your web browser.

To locate this source code, click on the link in the toolbar above: View > Page Source for the Firefox browser; for the Internet Explorer browser, click on Page > View Source; or click the wrench icon > Tools > View Source for the Google Chrome browser.

Once you open the source code in your browser, scroll down until you locate <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” />. It shouldn’t be too far down, because this code needs to be in the <head> section, which is the top part of the HTML web page’s source code.

Closing Comments about the Opt in Box, NoIndex Problem!

Just like Katie Freiling, we all work very hard to give people that are interested, the most in-depth, helpful information from our field of expertise that we can, and as such we should be able to distribute this information in a controlled manner.

If you happen to find your exclusive training material in the index database of either of the search-engines, be patient because it may take a few weeks for the pages to be removed from the search-engine’s index.

The only other alternative to protecting your training materials is through the use of a robot.txt file. For this you will need to gain access to your robots.txt file which is located in the root directory of your website.

But, if you are not familiar with how to access your root directory through an FTP client, then this method is a whole other article in itself and you might as well be satisfied with the above ‘NoIndex‘ attribute instructions.

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Incoming search terms:

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Tags: Blogging Tips, NoFollow Tag, NoIndex, Opt-In-Box, Search Engine Optimization

Category: Blogging, Content Writing, SEO, Wordpress