This really isn’t a hard SEO tool suggestion. Just a note for people like me who use a lot of Wordpress blogs.
I created a WP blog and wanted to set up a separate “members only” section where I could post FAQs, tips, suggestions, etc. So my main blog was at www.mainblog.com and my members-only blog would be installed at www.mainblog.com/members.
Sounds easy enough — just do another Wordpress install in the /members directory.
To make life easy, I thought I would just use the cPanel directory password feature. Now here’s the problem. When I did a cPanel directory protect, and then tried to access www.mainblog.com/members, it redirected me to my 404 page!
After a lot of searching I found this posting: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/111914
Basically the fix is to put these two lines at the top of the .htaccess file.
ErrorDocument 401 /members/index.php
ErrorDocument 403 /members/index.php
I think it might work with just the 401 line but someone suggested trying both. Apparently when you password protect a directory it kicks out either a 401 or 403 error. If you don’t put in the above code Wordpress eventually treats it as a 404 error and redirects you to that page.
A nice trick and my members section blog is now password protected!
P.S. Don’t forget to remove the members directory from being spidered in your robots.txt file.