Beplus Search Visibility

Beplus Search Visibility lets you keep individual posts, pages, or whole post types out of your site’s search results — without unpublishing them or blocking search engines. Excluded content still displays normally everywhere else: the homepage, archives, RSS feeds, and direct links.

Key Features

• Per-post exclude — a simple checkbox on the post/page edit screen, in a “Search Visibility” box.
• Quick toggle column — a “Search” column on the post list screen lets you flip a post’s visibility with one click, no need to open it.
• Bulk actions — exclude or re-include many posts at once from the list screen.
• Whole post type exclude — remove an entire post type (e.g. a “Testimonials” custom post type) from search results with one setting, no per-post work needed.
• Choose which post types get the feature — enable the per-post checkbox and column only where you need them.
• wp-admin search is never affected — editors can always find excluded content to manage it; only the public front-end search is filtered.
• Per-post SEO noindex — an independent “Exclude from SEO (noindex)” checkbox to keep a post out of search engines entirely, separate from the site-search checkbox above.
• Whole post type noindex — noindex an entire post type with one setting, no per-post work needed.
• SEO column on the post list — a one-click Indexed / Noindex toggle and bulk actions, just like the Search column.
• Noindexed content is removed from the WordPress XML sitemap — individual posts and whole post types — so Google Search Console doesn’t flag “Submitted URL marked noindex”.
• Noindexing a whole post type also noindexes its archive page.
• Noindex plays well with other SEO plugins — added through WordPress core’s own wp_robots filter (5.7+), which merges every plugin’s robots directives into a single tag, instead of printing a competing <meta name="robots"> of its own.

How It Works

1. Enable the feature for one or more post types in Settings > Search Visibility.
2. On any enabled post type, check “Exclude this from search results” and/or “Exclude from SEO (noindex)” in the Search Visibility box — the two are independent — or use the Search column’s toggle / the bulk action on the list screen for site-search exclusion.
3. The plugin hooks into pre_get_posts to remove excluded posts (and, optionally, entire excluded post types) from the public search query, and into wp_robots to add noindex for posts or post types marked for it.

Known Limitations

• The REST API search endpoint (/wp-json/wp/v2/search) is not filtered in this version — only the front-end s= search query is affected.
• wp-admin’s own post list search is intentionally left unfiltered, so editors can always find excluded content to manage it.

About BePlus

This plugin is developed and maintained by BePlus, a WordPress and Shopify development studio with 10+ years of experience building themes and plugins for nonprofits and eCommerce brands.

Learn more at beplusthemes.com.