Noindex

Noindex is an instruction on a page that says do not include this URL in the search index. Google and other engines drop the page from results when they see it.

You add it either as a meta robots tag in the HTML or as an HTTP X Robots Tag header. Robots.txt cannot set noindex for a URL.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

# HTTP response header
X-Robots-Tag: noindex

• Checkout, account, and dashboard pages like /checkout or /app/settings
• Thank you or confirmation pages like /signup/thanks
• Internal search results pages like /search?q=abc
• Staging or test areas that are not public content
• Hard duplicates you cannot redirect, like a printer view

Do not noindex pages that could bring qualified traffic with a small edit. For example, a thin /pricing page often ranks on brand queries once you add the plan details and a clear title.

1. 1

   Check the page itself

   Open yourproduct.com/page, View Source, and search for meta name="robots". If content includes noindex, the page is set to stay out. If not present, check the HTTP headers for X Robots Tag.

2. 2

   Use the command line

   Run: curl -I https://yourproduct.com/page and look for X-Robots-Tag: noindex in the response.

3. 3

   Check Search Console indexing

   In the Page indexing report, look under Why pages aren’t indexed for Excluded by 'noindex' tag. That lists URLs Google saw with noindex.

4. 4

   Check performance before you add noindex

   Open the Performance report, filter to the exact page, and look at impressions, clicks, CTR and average position for the last 28 days. An impression is counted when a link to your page appears on a results page a user loaded for web search. If the page has meaningful impressions or clicks, rethink noindex.

• Remove the meta robots noindex from the HTML, or remove the X Robots Tag header
• Request indexing in Search Console’s URL inspection after you deploy, then give it time to recrawl
• If the content is a duplicate, prefer a 301 redirect to the canonical URL
• If you must keep both, use a canonical link to the primary URL rather than noindex on both
• If the issue is soft quality, improve the page and internal links rather than hiding it

A fixed page looks like /guides/getting-started without a noindex tag, linked from /guides, and showing impressions rising in the next 28 days.

• Blocking with robots.txt instead of using noindex, which can prevent crawling but will not add noindex to the URL
• Accidentally shipping noindex sitewide from a staging template
• Using noindex to hide price changes or weak copy instead of fixing the page
• Noindexing a blog category or /guides page that has internal link value
• Leaving noindex on a page you link to from the header or footer, which wastes crawl and confuses signals