Sometimes a whole content type should be searchable except for a handful of pages. Checkout pages, thank you pages, internal notes and login pages are the usual suspects.
How to exclude an item:
- Go to Content Sources and scroll to Exclude Specific Items.
- Start typing the title of the page you want to hide.
- Click it in the list that appears.
The page is immediately removed from the index and appears as a chip in your exclusion list.
How to put an item back:
Click the small cross on its chip. The page is re-indexed straight away and can be found again.
Why exclusions work this way:
Searching to add is far faster than scrolling a list of a thousand pages, and the exclusion sticks even if you later rebuild the whole index. Excluded items are also skipped when you edit and save them, so they never quietly reappear.