Review your privacy settings

By default, spacebook sites are set up so they will NOT get indexed by Google or other search engines. They do not send referrer links to outside sites and cannot be tracked in analytics. There are no ad trackers, tracking cookies, or other nonsense installed. If you want to open your site to the public eye, jump down for easy instructions on how to share your spacebook with Google and the rest of the world.

Security through obscurity

By default, your site is hidden from search engines and won’t send referrer links but it is not truly secure. Anybody who discovers the link will be able to view the site. This is similar to the Anyone with the link permissions commonly set on Google Docs. You can use an obscured Netlify site URL for added protection against accidental discovery. This is the default setting and safe for many use cases.

Password encryption

If privacy is a priority and you wish to you put your site behind a password, you can do so by following the password protection instructions. This will encrypt all of your files, and require all users to enter a password before viewing. When you enable this option, you will see a small performance hit because each page is being decrypted on the fly as it loads.

Basic authentication

You can upgrade your Netlify account for basic site wide authentication if necessary. It is similar to the level two encryption but is less rough around the edges, it does not use encryption, and there is no page slow down once you have authenticated. It will cost you $20 a month or thereabouts.

Making your site public

At some point you may wish to open your site to Google and the general public. This is simple a matter of removing or changing your robots.txt file, and setting your site to send referrer links.

Remove robots.md

If you want to open up your site to Google and other search engines, simply remove or rename the robots.md file from the root of your project. (Or, change the _includes/layouts/robots.njk template to reflect the robots file of your liking!)

Remove noreferrer

If you want your outbound links to send referrers, edit the mdIterator plugin settings in your .eleventy.js configuration file to change these settings for external links. Simply remove the reference to “noreferrer” as shown below:

.eleventy.js 

  eleventyConfig.setLibrary("md", markdownIt(options)
    .use(mdIterator, 'url_new_win', 'link_open', function (tokens, idx) {
      const [attrName, href] = tokens[idx].attrs.find(attr => attr[0] === 'href')
      if (href && (!href.includes('franknoirot.co') && !href.startsWith('/') && !href.startsWith('#'))) {
        tokens[idx].attrPush([ 'target', '_blank' ])
        tokens[idx].attrPush([ 'rel', 'noopener' ]) 👈 remove noreferrer from this line!
      }
    })

You should leave the noopener in place unless you also remove the call to target _blank, in which case you can probably just remove this whole plugin!