What does noindex mean?
Noindex is a directive in a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header that tells search engines not to show a page in search results.
noindex is an instruction to search engines not to include a page in their results. It can be set in the page HTML or in an HTTP header:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Things to know
- The crawler must be able to fetch the page to see a noindex. If robots.txt blocks the page, the noindex is never read.
- A noindex left over from a staging environment is one of the most common causes of a site disappearing from Google.
X-Robots-Tagalso works for non-HTML files such as PDFs.
Related
- Noindex and indexability checker
Free indexability checker. Find accidental noindex tags and X-Robots-Tag headers, robots.txt rules that block Google, missing sitemaps, off-site canonicals and broken pages.
- Why is my page not indexed? A noindex and robots.txt checklist
A step-by-step checklist for pages missing from Google, covering noindex tags, X-Robots-Tag headers, robots.txt blocks, canonicals, sitemaps and server errors.
- What is robots.txt?
robots.txt is a text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers, including search engines and AI crawlers, which paths they may fetch.