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What is noindex?

Noindex is a rule, in a meta tag or HTTP header, that tells search engines not to show a page in results. How it works and the mistakes to avoid.

Updated

Noindex is a rule that tells search engines not to show a page in their results. You set it with a robots meta tag in the page’s HTML or with an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. When Google next crawls the page and sees it, Google drops the page from search, even if other sites link to it.

How do you add noindex?

As a meta tag in the <head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
As an HTTP response header (works for PDFs and other non-HTML files)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex

To target only Google, use name="googlebot" instead of robots.

Why is my noindex not working?

The most common reason: the page is also blocked in robots.txt. Google has to crawl a page to see its noindex rule. If robots.txt stops the crawl, Google never sees the tag and can still index the bare URL from links. Use one or the other: noindex to keep a page out of results, robots.txt to stop crawling.

It can also simply take time. Google drops the page after its next crawl, which for rarely visited pages can take weeks or longer. URL Inspection in Search Console can ask for a recrawl.

When should you use noindex?

  • Thank-you pages, internal search results, login pages, thin tag archives.
  • Staging copies of a site (better still, put them behind a password).

Don’t use noindex to choose between duplicates; use a canonical tag. And check templates after every release: a noindex left over from staging is one of the fastest ways to lose all of a site’s traffic.

How does it show in Search Console?

Pages with the rule appear in the Page indexing report as Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag. That is fine for pages you meant to hide and urgent for pages you didn’t.

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