We have been using non-public journals as sandbox/test grounds for production journals, where users can experiment with CSS styling and other functionalities. Currently, we are not able to host a separate instance of OJS purely for testing, hence our approach of using non-public journals.
An unexpected side-effect is that Google was able to find these non-public test journals and index them in both main search and Scholar.
Is there a way to prevent the indexing of non-public journals? Is there a automatic sitemap that lists all the journals somewhere in OJS? We have not explicitly set up a sitemap for our instance.
If your journal is not flagged “enabled” in the Journal Manager’s “Hosted Journals” area, then it shouldn’t be indexed by Google – unless something links to it somewhere outside of OJS. It’s possible, if you’re using an older release of OJS, that there was a link somewhere that could’ve exposed the content. But @ctgraham’s suggestion is the best solution.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team