How to Hide Unneeded CMS Pages

The Problem

You have a collection, but only some of the items need a Collection Page. The others are largely blank because those items don't have the content you want. Your goal is to;

• Hide content on those pages so that they do not appear as blank content, if someone comes across them.
• Suppress search engines from indexing those useless pages.
• Filter your collection lists throughout the site, so that you don't navigate people to those blank pages.

Solution #1

Here's an easily implemented solution, which I've built a cloneable to demonstrate.

Basically you add a special field to your Collection, and a few tweaks to your Collection Pages so that search engines won't index the blank ones.

• How to Suppress Specific Collection Pages - Cloneable
• Video Walkthrough - Video

I recommend this approach if MOST OF your pages are used, and only a few of them need to be suppressed.

Solution #2

Separate out your "special" content into a separate collection.

For example, you might have a table of employees, some of whom also perform a recruiting function, and have a bio page for contacting them.

Here you could have two collections, C1 and C2.

• C1 is Team Members in the company
• C2 is Recruiters, which is a subset of the Team Members

Set it up so that C1 has all of the general employee information, and C2 has the recruiter-specific information. Add a single-ref link from C1 to C2.

This makes it easy to;

• Identify which team members in C1 are recruiters and have a bio page in C2. You can easily display a button next to those collection list items and even pull C2 data ( like a linked-in URL ) into the collection lists displaying C1 content.
• Avoid blank pages entirely.
• Ensure that the sitemap.xml has only useful collection pages

One small downside here is that because C2 pages need to be able to display on their own, they may need some duplicate content ( like the team member's name ) with C1.

I recommend this approach when only a few of the C1 items need a page.

Tips

• You can use the same slug in both C1 and C2, for consistency, but you'll have to maintain that if you ever change them.
• It's possible to also have a single ref field from C2 to C1, so that you can link data in both directions... but this is somewhat ugly to administer in Webflow.

Resources

• The Robots META - Google Developers