Index manager in cpanel. Do contents still get indexed with “No Indexing”?

Question

Simple question.

A folder, lets say for example abc.com/images/ Is being displayed on google as "index of", which I don't like.

The contents of this folder are important, and it is important that they get indexed, but I don't want to see the "index of" page.

It is unclear to me whether selecting the "No Indexing" in cpanel will remove the contents from indexing as well.

http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/IndexManager

What should I do anyways, Redirect to another page? What's a common practice?

Answer 1

The "No Indexing" that you are seeing in cpanel controls whether or not the web server creates a document for the directory that lists all the files. Selecting "no indexing" will only prevent the directory contents from being listed but will not effect whether the contents of the directory can be crawled by search engines.

If you don't use the "no indexing" option:

• /images/ -- crawlable, list all files in the directory
• /images/test.jpg -- crawlable, may be included in Google's index

If you do use the "no indexing" option:

• /images/ -- not crawlable, not authorized error, contents not listed
• /images/test.jpg -- crawlable, may be included in Google's index

If you wish to redirect to another page rather than show an error for the directory, that is also fine. You would need redirect index.html to another url. You could do so by putting a redirect directive into .htaccess:

redirect permanent /index.html http://example.com/