In plain English
It's a "staff only" sign on a door. People who know the way can still walk in, but the door isn't listed in the building directory.
Used in a sentence
“The thank-you page and the test pages are set to noindex, so they never show up in Google.”
“Our whole site vanished from Google after the redesign, and it turned out the noindex setting from the staging site went live.”
In detail
Noindex is set with a robots meta tag in the page or a header from the server. Search engines that see it drop the page from their results, or never add it. It's used for pages that shouldn't be searched: thank-you pages, internal tools, duplicates, unfinished pages and staging copies of a site.
For noindex to work, search engines must be able to crawl the page and read the tag. If the page is also blocked in robots.txt, they can't see the instruction, and the page can stay in results. The most common disaster is a staging site's noindex accidentally carried over to the live site at launch.
Why it matters for your business
Used well, noindex keeps clutter out of search. Used by mistake, it can hide your whole site.
- Keeps private and thin pages out of Google
- Must be crawlable to work
- Always checked at launch
Easy to mix up
Noindex isn't the same as blocking a page in robots.txt. Robots.txt stops crawling; noindex stops indexing. To keep a page out of results, use noindex and let it be crawled.
Related terms
Indexing, Robots.txt and Crawling. Or browse the whole glossary.
