noindex 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.
is a robots directive that signals to search engines: this page should not appear in the search . It can be set as a in the <head> or as an in the header.
Typical 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.