Locking down SharePoint Application pages

SharePoint 2007 application pages (_layouts) can be locked down to prevent users from accessing them. This is helpful not only in preventing users from accessing application pages they don’t need to be accessing on a public facing web site, but also in preventing search engines from crawling application pages.

To lock down your SharePoint 2007 application pages, use the STSADM command:

stsadm -o activatefeature -url -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml

This can be unlocked using :

stsadm -o deactivatefeature -url -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml

Note: By default, this SharePoint 2007 feature is deactivated, unless the site was created using the “Publishing Site” template