Will my password protected categories be hidden from search engines?
The Password Protected Categories WordPress plugin will automatically hide your password protected categories and any posts they contain from search engines. It does this by adding a noindex,nofollow meta tag to these pages, as well as settings X-Robots-Tag in the response header.
In addition, the plugin will hide your protected categories and posts from sitemaps. The plugin currently includes support for the sitemaps provided in WordPress SEO (Yoast) and All In One SEO Pack.
Whilst this should be sufficient, we can’t absolutely guarantee that protected categories or posts won’t appear in search engine results. Some search engines do no respect these meta tags. It’s also possible that your categories were indexed before you installed our plugin, and so will still appear in the results.