Noindex

Noindex is a directive telling search engines to exclude a page from their index. You can set it with a robots meta tag in the HTML head or with an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which also works for PDFs and images.

Why it matters

Some pages should be reachable but not searchable: thank-you pages, internal search results, staging copies, thin tag archives. Noindex removes them from results without deleting them.

Use noindex for pages with a purpose but no search value, and use a 404 or 410 status, or a redirect, when a page is permanently gone.

Example

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

or in an HTTP response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Common mistakes

• Blocking the same page in robots.txt. The bot cannot fetch the page to see the noindex, so the directive is never read.
• Forgetting to remove noindex when a staging site goes live, which can make a whole site vanish from search.
• Expecting instant removal; it takes effect after the next crawl.

Related

• Indexing
• Robots.txt
• Nofollow
• Tool: HTTP header checker

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