A remote-server password that RankGear stores under a per-screen credential account and uses to authenticate connections, but never returns to the interface. You can save it and connect with it, yet the value is never displayed, logged, or exported back to you.
| Term | Write-Only Password |
|---|---|
| Category | APIs, Reliability and Publishing |
| Also known as | Saved Remote Password |
| Where it appears | Site Builder and Experiments |
What it means in RankGear
When Site Builder and Experiments connect to a remote publishing target — an FTP, SFTP, or hosting endpoint that needs a password — RankGear holds that password as a write-only secret. Once you enter and save it, it is used only to authenticate outbound connections. It is never read back into a form field, echoed to a log, or surfaced in a saved report. The credential is scoped to the specific screen and account that own it rather than shared across the whole application, so a password saved for one target stays isolated to that target.
How to interpret it
Because the value is never shown again, you cannot confirm a stored password by re-reading it. Judge whether the credential is correct by the visible connection status, the diagnostics, and a read-only credential test rather than by inspecting the secret. The key distinction is between a transient failure worth one bounded retry and invalid configuration that no amount of retrying will fix.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Timeout or temporary server error | Transient — a single bounded, longer retry is reasonable |
| Authorization rejected | Invalid credential or configuration — re-enter the password; do not keep retrying |
Example
You save publishing credentials for a staging host in Site Builder, then run an experiment that pushes changes to it. A later publish fails. The password field shows placeholder dots, not the value you typed. You run the connection test: a timed-out attempt receives one longer bounded retry, while an “authorization failed” result stops immediately — so RankGear never hammers the host with repeated rejected logins — and you know to re-enter the credential rather than wait it out.
Important considerations
- The password is write-only by design: it cannot be read back or exported, so keep your own source of truth (for example, a password manager) — RankGear will not recover it for you.
- Credential tests should stay read-only wherever possible, and the secret stays redacted in status displays, diagnostics, logs, and reports.
- The credential is scoped per screen and account, so updating it in one place does not silently change unrelated connections.
- This is a security and configuration setting for reaching a publishing target, not a ranking metric — it affects whether a connection succeeds, nothing about how a page performs in search.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.