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Answers are visible on the Internet when they should not be
Answer ID 4577   |   Last Review Date 06/23/2021

Why are my answers visible on the Internet when they should not be?

Environment:

Answers and end user pages on all versions.

Resolution:

If answers or pages of your site are visible on the Internet there are several ways to remove them from visibility.

1. Restrict access to the end user pages with configuration settings.

If your site is internal to your organization you can either require login to your end-user pages or restrict access to your end-user pages by IP address.

For information on requiring login, refer to Answer ID 881: Requiring customers to log in to end-user pages.

To restrict access to your site by IP address, refer to Answer ID 245: Restricting computers or hosts that can access the Oracle B2C Service pages.

To temporarily disable the end-user pages on your site, refer to Answer ID 2653: Temporarily disable end-user pages.

2. Change visibility settings for affected answers.

Answers that are not restricted by access level or status are visible on the end user pages.  Answers restricted by product, category or language will not be available in searches or reports but will be visible on all interfaces by the answer detail URL (<sitename>/app/answers/detail/a_id/####).

For information on answer access levels, refer to Answer ID 208: Specifying answer access levels to display on the end-user pages.

For information on how product and category visibility affects answers, refer to Answer ID 1112: Publishing an answer to the end-user pages.

3. Request changes to the robots.txt file or turn off Sitemap.

The Sitemap feature is a useful tool that allows search engines to find content on your site. If you wish to disable Sitemap, create a Service Request with Technical Support and request that Sitemap be disabled.  This will change the robots.txt file to disallow all search engines and will remove the sitemap.xml file.

For more information on Sitemap, refer to Answer ID 2553: Using a sitemap with our Oracle B2C Service application.

If you wish to make specific changes to your robots.txt file, please submit a service request to Ask Technical Support with the request. Please include the specific text that you wish to add to the file.  For more information on the format of the robots.txt file, refer to http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html.

4. Move files from locations that can not have restricted visibility.

Files added to the /assets directory are not protected with visibility settings.  Documents should not be added to this location.

For more information on linking files from answers, refer to Answer ID 4161: Storing additional files and graphics for answers.