Hi Ciaran

You can use the <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> tag to achieve this. You can for instance make a "Hide from search engines" checkbox on your "SEO" tab and if it's checked then render this line on the page - You can read more this meta tag here http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

But if you're thinking about making a password protected area on your website then it will not be indexed anyway (The login screen can be) since the pages are not reachable for the search engines since they do not have a login.

In regards to password protection you can read more about it here http://siempresolutions.co.uk/blog/UmbracoMembersProtectedAreaof_Website - In short you can right click a node and setup "public access", which can be either "Single user protection" or "Role based protection". Single user protection allows you to quickly allow access for a certain member/user on the fly providing email and password for one person directly on the node - The most common approach is to set role based protection, which is based on the member groups created in the "Members" section.

That way you can have a password restricted area on your website, which will require members to logon to gain access to the content. The public access settings will be inherited from parent to children all the way down to the last level of children.

In your code you'll then need to check if a certain member has access to the nodes - This is also illustrated in the article I referenced.

Hope this helps.

/Jan