noindex

noindexnoindex is a robots directive telling search engines that a page should not appear in search results. The page must remain crawlable for it to work.Open glossary entry → is a robots directive that signals to search engines: this page should not appear in the search indexIndexing is the step in which a search engine processes crawled content and decides whether a URL is added to the search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.Open glossary entry →. It can be set as a meta robots tagThe meta robots tag is an HTML element in a page's <head> that gives search engines indexing and link-following instructions such as noindex or nofollow.Open glossary entry → in the <head> or as an X-Robots-TagThe X-Robots-Tag is a robots directive sent in the HTTP header. It allows indexing rules such as noindex to be applied to non-HTML files like PDFs or images.Open glossary entry → in the HTTPHTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the protocol through which browsers and servers exchange web content. HTTPS is the encrypted, secure variant of this protocol.Open glossary entry → header.

Typical HTMLHyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the markup language for web pages. It defines the structure and content of a page, such as headings, paragraphs, links and images.Open glossary entry → implementation:

• <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
• <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> (do not index, but follow links)

For Google to see noindex, the page must not be blocked via robots.txt. noindex makes sense for internal search results, cart, checkout or thin archive pages. It becomes critical when important pages such as the homepage, service or product pages are accidentally set to noindex, because they then disappear from search. noindex is not the same as nofollow.