Need to find a solution to block indexing topics from a category

[hoangviet (DilysLena)]

it is a fact that search engines, bots can index topics in a category on discourse. How to block Google, bing, yandex, … from indexing topics of a category?

We look forward to Discourse experts’ support.

[Don]

You can change the category permission to TL0 so only logged in users will see it and also will block bots.

@Discourse

Setting up private categories

You can also make specific categories private:

1. Visit the category page
2. Click the edit button in the upper right corner to access category settings
3. Go to the “Security” tab
4. Adjust the permissions as needed
   
   

In this example, only users with accounts can access the category. Anonymous users are restricted from viewing it.

You can further customize category access by making certain categories readable or writable only to specific groups of users. These groups can be either public or private.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

If that Don suggested works use it. It is the only 100% sure way. But if that forum must be open for random visitors you can’t use TL0. Sure you can use User-agent: * Disallow: / or similar meta, but sometimes those are respected and sometimes not. If somebody shares a link using gmail Google will index no matter you have in robots.txt or meta.

And those tricks are effective only if a bot obeys those. Most of SEO crawlers don’t follow. And then there is a zillion rogue bots and script kiddies trying to do something.

So, what you have to do depends on what kind level of privacy you are looking for.