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Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but ...

I have a small website where I showcase my work in design/art/photography/etc, and I have developed an article template which I would like to use as a promotional tool - local events, other artists work, personal blog posts, etc, etc.

As there is no set theme for what I write about, I was planning on simply placing the articles in a folder on the domain, giving each one a unique ID so that those featured in the article can link it from their social media accounts or websites. Like:

http://example.com/articles/id/40294092 ... A local business profile
http://example.com/articles/id/53904930 ... A music event article

But, I have 2 problems.

First ... As all articles are placed withing the same articles/id path, it's quite easy for people to type in a code ( 24209429 ) to see any other article that I have written, which may mean they see material that is sensetive, as I plan on writng a lot about horror films and macabre art. However, as the code is randomly generated it's unlikely that people would find content in this way, but possible - Especially if they search for example.com/article in Google.

Second ... I plan on having adverts on these articles, and as there is no set homepage I was wondering how I could get verified on things like AdSense, as they would not be able to link to example.com/articles and see all of my content.

Any advice on a good way to both get verified by AdSense, AND keep my articles as private as possible?

W Six
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  • Your SEO won't work if you have "private" articles. How will you get Google to index them? First, Googlebot won't be able find them. You could provide a sitemap.xml, but that probably won't get most of them indexed, and certainly not ranked well. See The Sitemap Paradox – Stephen Ostermiller Jan 27 '20 at 10:37
  • I'm not worried about SEO - These are purely written as material that can be linked to from the the people who I write about - So a music venue can link people to the article for information about a gig. They are too short lived to worry about long term SEO – W Six Jan 27 '20 at 10:41
  • So you won't need to worry about people searching example.com/article in Google then. You could consider just adding a noindex tag to prevent search engines from picking them up altogether. – Stephen Ostermiller Jan 27 '20 at 10:42
  • Not nessessarily - If someone uses the phrase "check out these photos of our latest event at http://example.com/articles/id/40294092", and their site is crawled, the word is then searchable. I could use bit.ly as a possible workaround, but there's no guarantee. Any ideas about the AdSense problem @StephenOstermiller? – W Six Jan 27 '20 at 10:54

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