How to Hide Pages and Add Them to Your Site’s Footer

icon1 Posted by Rochelle in How To... on 04 16th, 2008 | 6 responses

Vacation time is over so it’s back to building my niche stores. Camping at Disney World is a great experience. My girls loved it, my husband relaxed, and I had plenty of time to ponder my sites. At least I didn’t take a notepad or I would have done nothing but take notes.

I’ve decided that I want to remove the privacy policy and sitemap pages from the site navigation sidebar and put them in my footer. If you would also like to do this then keep reading ; )

The method I’m described here is about hiding content pages. You can also use this method for hiding store pages, or adding store pages to your footer.

Lastly, this is for v3 and higher Build A Niche Stores.

 

My instructions to add links to your site’s footer:
Step One
  Log in to your site’s Admin and click on the ‘Content Pages‘ tab. Find the page you want to hide (or create a new one) and click the ‘off‘ button. Click the ‘Turn On/Off‘ button to hide the page.
Step Two
  Click on the ‘Template‘ tab and the ‘footer.php‘ link.
   
  Scroll down and find the Copyright © <?php echo date("Y");?> <a href="<?php print URL_PATH."/";?>"> <?php print SITENAME."";?></a><?=$front->powered();?> code. Add the following directly after this code on the same line:
 
 | <a href="http://yoursiteURL.com/Sitemap">Sitemap</a> | <a href="http://yoursiteURL.com/Privacy-Policy">Privacy Policy</a>
  Note: Make the following changes before you save the footer.php:
 
  • http://yoursiteURL.com/Sitemap = the URL where your site’s Sitemap is located (this is the sitemap visible from within your site, NOT the dynamic sitemap that ends in .xml)
  • yoursiteURL.com/Privacy-Policy = the URL where your site’s privacy policy is located
   
  The finished code will look something like:
  Copyright © <?php echo date("Y");?> <a href="<?php print URL_PATH."/";?>"> <?php print SITENAME."";?></a><?=$front->powered();?> | <a href="http://yoursiteURL.com/Sitemap">Sitemap</a> | <a href="http://yoursiteURL.com/Privacy-Policy">Privacy Policy</a>
   
  Save changes and view site for errors.
Step Three
  If you want to add additional links then add the following code to the code above:
  | <a href=”yoursiteURL.com/Page-You-Want“>Link Name for Page</a>
   
  Note: Make the following changes before you save the footer.php:
 
  • yoursiteURL.com/Page-You-Want = the URL of the page you want to link to
  • Link Name for Page = the anchor text (or wording) for the link
.

You are not limited to putting these links in the footer. You can play around with where you want the links to go. I like them there because they are out of the way but still found by spiders. Many sites put these type links in the footer or header.

Rochelle



6 Responses to “How to Hide Pages and Add Them to Your Site’s Footer”

  1. Gus says:
    May 30, 2008 at 12:58 pm

    Hi Rochelle,

    I love this tip! Good job! I’ve implemented a fair amount of your tips to my sites. However, I noticed that when I move my privacy policy page to the footer and hide it from the content menu, it disappears from my sitemap xml. I’d like to make sure it stays in the sitemap so the page is indexed. Or is this a limitation w/ the BANS programming?

    Gus

  2. Shelley says:
    June 5, 2008 at 7:47 am

    Hi Rochelle,

    I love this tip as well. It keeps things very tidy.
    With that being said I would also like to know about the privacy policy not appearing on the sitemap. Is this an issue or not?

    I know you haven’t been well, so when you get a chance, I’d love to see what you think about this.

    Cheers

    Shelley

  3. Rochelle says:
    June 8, 2008 at 5:50 pm

    Gus and Shelley,

    Until you both commented on this I hadn’t realized that hiding pages removes them from the sitemap. Regarding whether this is an issue or not really depends on your meanind of the question.

    If you are worried that visitors to your site who look at your sitemap won’t be able to find hidden links, via the sitemap (they will still be able to find them in your footer), then I guess it is an issue.

    If you are worried that removing links from your sitemap will also hide them from search engines, such as Google, you don’t need to worry. The fact that they are added to your footer means search engines will still find them. You will still get Google love by having the links in your footer.

    If, however, you have a different concern, let me know and I’ll do my best to address it.

    Rochelle

  4. Gus says:
    June 10, 2008 at 6:16 pm

    Thanks for the response Rochelle. Yes, my concern was about Google not finding it. I guess I’m covered by having it in the footer.

    Regards,
    Gus

  5. Rochelle says:
    June 10, 2008 at 6:44 pm

    Yes, having the link in your footer means you are covered.

    Rochelle

  6. Chuck Anthony says:
    July 3, 2008 at 11:04 am

    Hello Rochelle and thank you for the helpful BANS tips. I’ve referred to the index many times. Also giving you props on my BANS blog, not that anyone’s visiting (yet) but wanted to acknowledge you for assisting others in this endeavor.

    Chuck Anthonys last blog post..Build A Niche Store (BANS) Resources

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