How to hide your domain from search engines in the Legacy interface

Note: To read about how to hide your domain from search engines in the new TalentLMS interface, click here.

TalentLMS allows you to hide your domain from search engines.

To do that:

1. Sign in to your TalentLMS account as an Administrator and go to Home > Account & Settings.

2. On the Basic settings tab, in the Security section, check Hide from search engines (1).

3. Click Save to update your portal.

The content of your portal is no longer visible to search engines.

Note: When this option is enabled, search engine crawlers will be requested not to index the public areas of the LMS (such as the course catalog, the custom homepage, etc). Public areas are pages that do not require any login to be accessed. In case the pages have already been indexed, you will have to request their removal from search engine crawlers. For example, in Google, you can request a page removal by clicking here.

What to do if your pages are already indexed

If public documents (e.g., certifications, PDFs, public course pages) have already been indexed, here’s what to do depending on your setup:

A. You’re using a TalentLMS subdomain: Contact us with the list of indexed URLs.

B. You’re using a custom domain: Verify domain in Google Search Console and then, request the removal of indexed content.

Let’s look at both scenarios below.

A. If your portal is a TalentLMS subdomain (e.g., yourdomain.talentlms.com)

You can request that we assist with removing the indexed pages from search engine results. Please contact our support team and share the exact URLs you’d like to have removed. We will handle the removal request.

Note: Also, if you’re fine with your portal not being indexed, you should check the Hide from search engines option in your portal settings.

B. If your portal is a custom domain (e.g., learn.yourcompany.com)

Since your organization manages this domain, you will need to take action to request page removals and block future indexing. Here's how:

First, to verify your domain in Google Search Console:

1. Go to Google Search Console and click Start now (1). If you’re not already signed in to your Google account, you’ll be prompted to log in.

2. Then, you’ll need to select a Property Type. Choose Domain property (2) and enter your portals’ domain name, e.g. learn.yourcompany.com.

3. Click Continue (3).

4. Next, you will see the screen below. Copy (4) the generated TXT record and paste it into your domain provider (DNS).

5. Once this is done, click Verify (5).

Then, to request the removal of indexed content:

1. Once verified, go to the Removals (1) section in Google Search Console

2. Click New Request (2).

3. Enter the URL(s) of the pages you'd like removed from search results (3).

Note: For example, if some of your certifications have been indexed, then you should ask to remove all URLs with this prefix: /users/certifications/. Otherwise, if you have specific pages in mind, then you can click on the Remove this URL only option.

4. Click Next (4).