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A school site is open to search engines by default: the platform serves robots.txt and sitemap.xml itself, and the server puts the page meta tags (title, description, canonical) into the <head> of the initial HTML — before the code from Custom HTML. The lang attribute of <html> is the page language: the user’s language if the school supports it, otherwise the school’s main language.

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The “The school is visible in search engines” switch

  1. Open the control panel → “Login and registration” (the “Privacy and registration” page, https://<school-domain>/manage/school/privacy).
  2. Expand “Advanced settings” and turn “The school is visible in search engines” on or off (“The company is visible in search engines” in a corporate school).
  3. Save the changes.
The switch is on by default for every school, both public and private: finding a school in search does not mean entering it. While the switch is off, the “Advanced settings” block opens by itself. The setting can be changed by a manager with the “School Settings Management” permission (SchoolManageSettings).
When the school site is closed to indexing:
  • every page of the site is served with the X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow header — search engines drop the site from results;
  • sitemap.xml answers 404, and robots.txt has no Sitemap line.
The site is closed the same way when the school is inactive or has no active subscription, regardless of the switch.

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sitemap.xml

The sitemap is built on the fly at https://<school-domain>/sitemap.xml (cached for an hour). Only an indexable school serves it, and only on its canonical domain: if the school has its own domain connected, the sitemap exists only there, and the base *.exode.biz address answers 404 — so the sitemap never lists URLs of another host. The pages of the school site in the sitemap are custom pages with the “Page” window type that open without sign-in (“Require sign-in” is off in the page form), except the one assigned as the main page (it is already listed as /). Windows (“Floating window”, “Side panel”, “Fullscreen”), system pages and control panel pages are not listed.

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robots.txt

robots.txt is one file for all platform hosts and is built for the domain of the request:
robots.txt of an indexable school
Only an indexable school on its canonical domain gets the Sitemap line. Crawling of non-indexable hosts is not disallowed: under Disallow a search engine would not open the page and would not see noindex, so the X-Robots-Tag header removes them from results. If building the file fails, robots.txt still answers 200 — without the Sitemap line.

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Response codes

The school site server answers with honest status codes, so search engines do not index placeholders:
Updated: 2026-10-22 23:06 UTC