Unlisted posts: share without publishing

Sometimes you want a post to exist at a URL without broadcasting it to every visitor. A few real scenarios:

• Sharing a draft with a reviewer before it’s ready to publish
• A changelog entry you want to link to from a release note, but not surface in the blog feed
• Internal documentation that lives on the public site but isn’t meant for general discovery
• A post you’ve retired but still need to keep alive for existing links

The unlisted frontmatter field handles all of these.

How it works

Set unlisted: true in a post’s frontmatter:

---
title: My unlisted post
description: Only visible via direct link.
pubDate: 2026-05-18
unlisted: true
---

That single flag does the following:

The post is built and deployed normally. Only discovery is suppressed.

SEO: the unlistedHideFromSeo field

By default, an unlisted post also gets:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

This tells search engines not to index the page and not to follow its outbound links. It’s the right default — if you’re hiding a post from your own listings, you probably don’t want Google surfacing it either.

You can control this independently with unlistedHideFromSeo:

# Unlisted from all listings, AND hidden from search engines (default)
unlisted: true
# unlistedHideFromSeo defaults to true — no need to write it explicitly

# Unlisted from listings, but still indexable by search engines
# (e.g. you want Google to find it, just not your own nav)
unlisted: true
unlistedHideFromSeo: false

# Fully listed in your site, but hidden from search engines
# (e.g. a page you want readers to find via your nav, not via Google)
unlisted: false
unlistedHideFromSeo: true

The two fields are independent. Mix them however your use case requires.

Unlisted vs draft

These two fields solve different problems:

Use draft when the post isn’t ready to exist at all. Use unlisted when the post is ready but you want to control who finds it.

Seeing it in action

This theme ships with a sample unlisted post so you can verify the behaviour yourself. It does not appear anywhere in the site navigation, listings, or RSS — but it is live at this URL:

👉 /posts/unlisted-sample-post

Open that link, then check:

• The home page — the post is not there
• The Archives — not there
• The RSS feed (/rss.xml) — not there
• The page source — you’ll see <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

A note on truly private content

unlisted is security through obscurity, not access control. The post is public — anyone who discovers the URL can read it. If you need genuinely private content, keep it out of the repository entirely or use a platform that supports authentication.