Balancing Google Indexing with Group-Based Search Restrictions

Thanks @Jagster for the reply, I am working with @emonunix on this.

Here is what we are trying to accomplish.

  • We want to give users access to discrete group/groups with access to categories
  • We want to hide all categories that are not in these group/groups
  • We want google to index everything (all categories)

Right now we are using ‘muting’ as a way to hide categories from users when they come to the site. The have to join a group to access categories.

Now the funny part is, they only are aware of a set of categories in their group…they cannot ‘see’ any other categories (because they are muted).

They then start to search, in theory for stuff in the categories they have access to and suddenly they see a bunch of stuff from categories they had no idea existed…that’s confusing them.

Is there anyway to accomplish this?