Noindex is a directive used in SEO to tell search engines not to index a particular webpage. When a page is tagged with a “noindex” meta tag, search engines like Google or Bing will crawl the page but won’t include it in their search results. This is useful when you want to keep certain pages from being publicly searchable without removing them entirely from your website.
The Noindex tag is typically added in the HTML of a page like this:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Common scenarios for using Noindex include:
- Thank You pages: After a user completes a form, you may not want the confirmation page showing up in search results.
- Internal admin pages: Pages used only by your team, like login or dashboard screens, don’t need to be searchable.
- Duplicate content: If you have multiple versions of the same page, you might choose to Noindex one to avoid SEO penalties for duplicate content.
Keep in mind that while Noindex stops a page from appearing in search results, it doesn’t block it from being crawled or followed. If you don’t want search engines to crawl the page at all, you’d use Noindex combined with Nofollow.