With Ning 3.0, there is no single privacy setting on your network to make every page private or public. Instead, you set the privacy option for each individual page you create, which allows you to choose highly customized network privacy options.
Setting page privacy settings
You can set each page to be public and viewable by everyone or you can select from the other more private viewing permissions: Members, Featured Members, Administrators, and Member Categories. You can control the privacy of pages from your network’s Social Site Manager. For instructions on how to set the privacy options for each page, see: Enable Viewing Permissions. Changes to the privacy settings of your Ning Network’s pages can be made at any time though it may take a few minutes for new privacy settings to take effect.
Privacy settings are set per page, so any page set to private will not be crawled by search engines. If you would like search engines to crawl your entire network, go ahead and set each page to public.
Taking your network offline
If you need to take your network offline so that only you can access it, you can do so by changing every page’s status to “Draft.” While you are viewing a page in your Social Site Builder, you will see a Status option to have a Published or Draft version of a page.
Once you save your changes, only you as the Network Creator will be able to see your network. Vistors and members will see a message that the network is offline.