How to prevent survey results from showing up in public searches?

Simin Hailu

I asked this before but never got a response so I'm trying again.

It has come to my attention on a few occassions that our survey results are popping up in Google searches. Everyone's answers are listed on a page for the whole world to see. How to stop this from happening?! It appears to be an issue with all of our surveys, regardless of any security settings I placed on them. Please advise.

Noah Cooper

On Step 1 of editing a Survey, you need to set #4 - Results Security Category to "Administrators Only". I just spotchecked a few of the Surveys on your site and some are set correctly while others are not. For example, "2011 Affiliate Matching Fund Application" has the Results Security Category set to "General", meaning anyone can view the results (thus Google is able to index the page).

Simin Hailu

Noah Cooper:

On Step 1 of editing a Survey, you need to set #4 - Results Security Category to "Administrators Only". I just spotchecked a few of the Surveys on your site and some are set correctly while others are not. For example, "2011 Affiliate Matching Fund Application" has the Results Security Category set to "General", meaning anyone can view the results (thus Google is able to index the page).

I can go ahead and change those settings but that isn't actually cause of the problem. I know because the Contact Us survey's results showed up in a Google search and that one is set to Administrators Only. Have any other ideas?

Noah Cooper

Simin Hailu:

I can go ahead and change those settings but that isn't actually cause of the problem. I know because the Contact Us survey's results showed up in a Google search and that one is set to Administrators Only. Have any other ideas?

That would be the only way the Survey results link would be visible to users/search engines. If the Contact Us Survey previously had its Results Security Category set incorrectly and was later changed to Administrators Only, that won't make Google remove the page from its index. If you want Google to remove the page from search results, you'll need to use Google Webmaster Tools (see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734).

Nisha Vishwasrao

I was going through your post and was wondering if you were able to resolve this? Could you please share the root cause of the issue if you had found one.


-Thanks,

Nisha


Noah Cooper:

Simin Hailu:

I can go ahead and change those settings but that isn't actually cause of the problem. I know because the Contact Us survey's results showed up in a Google search and that one is set to Administrators Only. Have any other ideas?

 

That would be the only way the Survey results link would be visible to users/search engines. If the Contact Us Survey previously had its Results Security Category set incorrectly and was later changed to Administrators Only, that won't make Google remove the page from its index. If you want Google to remove the page from search results, you'll need to use Google Webmaster Tools (see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164734).