Noindex Tag: How to Use It (and Noindex vs Nofollow)

How Noindex Works

Google’s documentation is short on this: once Googlebot crawls a page and finds a noindex rule, Google drops the page entirely from its search results, whether or not other sites link to it. Three details matter in practice:

• Google has to crawl the page to see the rule. If robots.txt blocks the URL, Google never sees the noindex, and the page can still show up in results through links from other sites.
• It takes effect on the next crawl. Google notes that, depending on how important a page is, it may take months to revisit it. You can ask for a recrawl in URL Inspection; for urgent removals, use the Removals tool in Search Console.
• Other search engines may treat it differently. Google says so directly. Bing supports noindex as well; test it if another engine matters to you.

Two Ways to Add Noindex

1. The robots meta tag (HTML pages)

Put it in the page’s <head>. The name and content are case-insensitive.

<!-- all search engines -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

<!-- Google only (Google supports the googlebot and googlebot-news tokens) -->
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

2. The X-Robots-Tag header (any file type)

For PDFs, images and other files without an HTML head, send the rule as an HTTP response header. It works for HTML pages too.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Rules can be combined with commas (noindex, nofollow). If rules conflict, Google applies the more restrictive one. Full reference: X-Robots-Tag.

Noindex vs Nofollow

They sound alike but control different things: noindex is about the page itself; nofollow is about the links on it.

The page-level nofollow rule is not the same as rel="nofollow" on a single link. The link attribute marks one outbound link you don’t want to vouch for. For URLs on your own site, Google’s link guide suggests a robots.txt Disallow instead of nofollowed links.

noindex, follow or noindex, nofollow?

Most pages you noindex can keep their links followable; there’s rarely a reason to add nofollow. But don’t count on a page that stays noindexed for a long time to pass value through its links: in 2017 Google’s John Mueller said long-term noindex ends up treated like noindex, nofollow. Details in noindex, follow explained.

When to Use Noindex

Use it for pages that should work for visitors but have no place in search results:

• Internal search results. (WordPress core already adds noindex to its search result pages.)
• Thank-you, confirmation, cart, checkout and account pages.
• Thin archives, such as tag pages with one or two posts.
• Printable or filtered views that you don’t want in search and can’t consolidate.

When not to use it:

• For duplicates of a live page: use a canonical tag instead, so signals are merged rather than dropped. See canonical vs noindex.
• For paginated pages: page 2, 3 and so on should stay indexable, with their own canonical, so items linked from them can be found.
• To save crawl budget: Google’s crawl budget guide notes it still requests noindexed pages. Use robots.txt for URLs you never want crawled.
• For staging sites: a password is safer than a tag you might forget to remove at launch.

Noindex vs robots.txt Disallow

Disallow stops crawling; noindex stops indexing. They don’t combine: a disallowed page can’t be crawled, so its noindex is never read, and it can still be indexed from links (Search Console then reports it as “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt”). Pick noindex to keep a page out of results, and Disallow to keep crawlers out of URL spaces you don’t care about.

How to Add Noindex on Common Platforms

• WordPress (whole site): Settings > Reading > “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” Since version 5.7, core then adds a robots noindex tag to every page. Make sure this is off on a live site.
• WordPress (one page): use your SEO plugin’s per-page setting, such as the advanced options in Yoast SEO or the robots meta options in Rank Math.
• Shopify: set the seo.hidden metafield on a product, page or collection to hide it from search engines and the sitemap, or add a conditional robots tag in theme.liquid.
• Wix: each page’s SEO settings include an option to stop search engines indexing it.
• Next.js (App Router): set robots in the page’s metadata, or send the header from next.config.js.

// app/thank-you/page.tsx
export const metadata = { robots: { index: false, follow: true } };
// renders <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

# Apache (.htaccess): noindex every PDF
<FilesMatch "\.pdf$">
  Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"
</FilesMatch>

# nginx
location ~* \.pdf$ {
  add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex";
}

Check That It Works

Look at both places the rule can live:

curl -s https://example.com/page | grep -i 'name="robots"'
curl -sI https://example.com/page | grep -i x-robots-tag

Then inspect the URL in Search Console. The live test reports whether indexing is allowed and, if not, whether the noindex came from the meta tag or the header. Pages Google has already dropped appear in the Page indexing report as “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag”.

Common Mistakes

• A leftover site-wide noindex from staging or a “discourage search engines” box that was never unticked. It can quietly remove a whole site from Google.
• Noindexed pages in the XML sitemap. The sitemap says “index this,” the page says “don’t.” List only pages you want indexed.
• Removing noindex with JavaScript. Google’s JavaScript guide warns that when it sees noindex it may skip rendering, so a script that removes the tag may never run. If a page should be indexed, leave noindex out of the original HTML.
• A header nobody knows about. An X-Robots-Tag set by a server rule, CDN or plugin doesn’t show in view-source. Check the response headers too.
• Noindex plus a robots.txt block on the same URL: the block hides the noindex.

Removing Noindex

Delete the tag or header at its source (template, plugin setting or server rule), confirm with the curl check above, and request indexing in URL Inspection for your most important pages. The page comes back after Google recrawls it and decides it’s worth indexing.

FAQ

Does Google crawl noindex pages?

Yes. It has to crawl a page to see the rule, and Google’s crawl budget guide notes that it still requests noindexed pages. That’s why noindex doesn’t save crawl budget.

How long does noindex take to work?

Until Google next crawls the page. For less important pages, Google says that can take months. Request a recrawl in URL Inspection, or use the Removals tool if you need the page out of results urgently.

What’s the difference between a nofollow tag and a noindex tag?

noindex keeps the page out of search results. nofollow tells Google not to follow the links on the page. A page can have either, both, or neither.

Related Guides

• Noindex, Follow Explained
• X-Robots-Tag
• Canonical vs Noindex
• Excluded by Noindex Tag in Search Console
• Robots.txt and Noindex