Noindex

What noindex does and does not do

A crawler must be able to fetch the page to see the noindex. If robots.txt blocks the page, the crawler never reads the tag, and the URL can still appear in results with no description. So never block a page in robots.txt that you want removed with noindex.

Noindex does not stop links on the page from being followed, unless you also add nofollow. A common pattern is "noindex, follow": keep this page out of results, but use its links to find others.

When to use it

Thin or empty pages, such as a tag page with one item or a search results page. Private areas such as dashboards and settings. Thank you pages and checkout steps. Duplicate formats of a page, such as a Markdown twin of an HTML page.

Aback Launch noindexes facet pages, such as a category or tag, until they hold enough live launches to be useful. They switch to indexable automatically once they pass the minimum, and only then appear in the sitemap.

Mistakes to avoid

Shipping a staging noindex to production. Listing noindexed pages in your sitemap, which Search Console reports as an error. Linking to many noindexed pages from your navigation, which spends crawl and link equity on pages that cannot rank.

Example

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> on a tag page with two launches. Once the tag reaches five launches, the tag goes and the page joins the sitemap.

Questions people ask

How long does noindex take to work?

Until the page is crawled again. For a page Google visits often that can be days. Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to request a recrawl.