What is noindex? #
- The noindex rule tells search engines not to index a page, so it won’t appear in search results.
- Google respects this rule when it crawls the page and sees the noindex directive.
- If the page is blocked by robots.txt, Google can’t crawl it and won’t see the noindex — so the page might still show in search results based on external links or other signals.
How to Implement noindex #
1. Using the <meta> Tag (for HTML pages) #
Place this inside the <head> section of your HTML page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
- This blocks all search engines that support noindex from indexing the page.
To target only Google’s crawler:
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>
You can combine noindex with other directives like nofollow:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>
2. Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header (for all resource types) #
Use this in your server’s HTTP response headers — ideal for non-HTML files like PDFs, images, videos:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
Example HTTP response snippet:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
(…)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
(…)
Important Notes & Troubleshooting #
- robots.txt must NOT block the page, or Googlebot won’t be able to see the noindex.
- If a page still appears in search results after adding noindex:
- Google might not have recrawled it yet (can take days to months).
- Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to request recrawl.
- Google might not have recrawled it yet (can take days to months).
- To quickly remove pages from search results, use Google’s Removals tool.
- Verify the implementation by checking the HTML source Googlebot sees in URL Inspection.
- CMS users (Wix, WordPress, Blogger, etc.) might use a settings page to add noindex meta tags without editing HTML.