I’m developing a new set of pages that will have their own navigation. It’s a faculty handbook, and I want each section to be a new page with a persistent navigation from one page to the next.
This is a work-in-progress, so we aren’t ready to make these pages public yet. But there seems to be no way to create a visible navigation in this scenario. Pages that are hidden and/or not visible to “everyone” don’t show in navigations. But to change those settings would cause these pages to be included in the XML sitemap, and thus be found by search engines before we are ready.
Would it work to use one of these options from Sitemaps and robots.txt - LiveWhale Support?
- Anything in a folder that starts with
/_
(e.g., /_sample/index.php) - Any page that contains “.test.” in the filename (e.g., index**.test.**php)
- Any page that contains “/test/“ in the filepath (e.g., /admissions**/test/**open-house/index.php)
Any of those would require me to rename the folder or the files during development and then change it when ready to publish. But at least then I could make the pages live and visible to everyone, in order for the navigation to work, without them getting found by search engines.
Right? Is that the only/best way to accomplish this?