Frequently Asked Question

What is a noindex tag?

In a nutshell, the noindex directive lets you prevent a webpage from being included in Google search results.

Webmasters can prevent a webpage, or other resource, from appearing in Google search by including a noindex meta tag in the <head> of the source, or header in the HTTP response. When the Googlebot next crawls that page and sees the noindex, Google will remove that from index and search results.

Note - for the noindex directive to work, the noindexed page can’t be blocked in the website’s robots.txt file, and must be accessible to crawlers. If the page is blocked by a robots.txt file, or the crawler can't access the page, the crawler will never see the noindex directive, and the page can still appear in search results if Google had previously crawled it or if other websites link to it.

There are two ways to implement noindex:

<meta> tag

Place the following meta tag into the HTML <head> section of your page source code:

HTTP response header

Instead of a meta tag, you can also return an X-Robots-Tag header. This approach is good for non-HTML resources, such as PDFs, video files, and images.

Here's an example of an HTTP response with an X-Robots-Tag:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

(…)

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

(…)

Additional information:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/block-indexing

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