noindex
An instruction to keep a page out of search results, sent as a header or a meta tag.
What noindex does not show
A crawler obeys either, so setting it in one place and not the other still removes the page.
Where noindex comes up on this site
- How to audit an XML sitemap: status, content type, canonical URLs and stale entriesThe response may be an HTML login wall, a cached error page, a challenge interstitial, malformed XML, or a clean list of URLs that redirect, canonicalize elsewhere, carry noindex , or no longer exist.
- Meta robots, X-Robots-Tag and robots.txt: the three permission layers and the rule placed in the wrong oneSites fail this audit by putting a rule in the wrong layer, and the most common failure is a noindex that no crawler can ever read. .t{font:600 13px system-ui,sans-serif;fill:var(--ink)}.s{font:12px…
- Staging site leak: how a staging host ends up in live pagesAny crawler that follows the reference reaches a host that usually answers 200 with a full copy of the site, and unless that host sends noindex or requires authentication, it is a duplicate of every page with a different hostname.
- Content Signals in robots.txt: search, ai-input, ai-trainPage-level directives such as noindex , nosnippet or max-snippet , in a meta robots tag or an X-Robots-Tag header, decide what a search engine may do with a page it has fetched, and Google applies nosnippet to its AI features as well as to classic snippets.
- IndexNow: what it does, who reads it, how to check itWhat IndexNow does not do It does not make a page indexable that is blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex , or canonicalised elsewhere; the engine will fetch it and reach the same conclusion it would have reached on its own.
Terms this definition uses
Definitions that name noindex
Related terms in Indexing and discovery
Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.
index coverage · canonical · X-Robots-Tag · orphan page · E-E-A-T · E-E-A-T proxies · topical authority · Soft 404 · case consistency · accessibility structure · landmark region · accessible name · skip link · main landmark · alt attribute · form control name · duplicate id · IndexNow · faceted navigation · thin content · duplicate content · near-duplicate · boilerplate · MinHash · shingle · dead anchor · placeholder content · image placeholder · alt text · EXIF
Questions about noindex
What is noindex?
An instruction to keep a page out of search results, sent as a header or a meta tag.
What does noindex not show or guarantee?
A crawler obeys either, so setting it in one place and not the other still removes the page.
Which area of the glossary does noindex belong to?
Indexing and discovery: Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.
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See it in the full glossary · 731 terms across 19 areas.