Is it possible to hide individual forum posts from search engines?

Howdy Egale - Have you considered moving the post to a hidden private group? 

Howdy Egale - Have you considered moving the post to a hidden private group? 

It wouldn't really be appropriate as our forum is public. The only hidden area we have is for questions about the functionality of the forum, which this is sadly not. It's one of our top viewed posts for the past couple of months. 

Egale said:

It's one of our top viewed posts for the past couple of months. 

... but that's only because it became contentious (and who doesn't love a popcorn thread  there really should be an emoji for that! ) so it's not something we'd want to promote. However as Evanna says, we'd like to be able to hide it from google search engines so it doesn't appear in any results if someone searches using particular popular key words when trying to find information about our organisation which unfortunately appear in the title of the thread!  

It's disappointing as the thread started out with all good intentions to encourage a valuable discussion but was quickly hijacked 

Perhaps this is another suggestion for the ideas Egale ? 

If it's a single thread, you could exclude the URL in your robots.txt file and use your search provider accounts to remove it. Just remember to update your robots.txt if you do ever move the thread.