Noindex
A directive that tells search engines to keep a page out of their index. The page must stay crawlable for the tag to be seen.
Noindex is a directive — set with a robots meta tag (<meta name="robots" content="noindex">) or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header — that tells search engines not to include a page in their index. The page can still be crawled and its links followed; it just won't appear in search results.
It's the right tool for pages that need to exist but shouldn't rank: thin utility pages, internal search results, thank-you and account pages, staging content, and low-value filtered views. Removing weak pages from the index this way can even help overall quality perception, since it stops thin pages from dragging on the site.
The critical catch: a page must remain crawlable for noindex to work. If you also block it in robots.txt, Google never fetches the page, never sees the noindex, and may keep the URL indexed as a bare link. Choose one mechanism per intent — noindex to deindex, robots.txt to save crawl budget — and don't combine them on the same URL.
Related terms
- Canonical Tag — A rel="canonical" link that names the preferred URL for a page, telling search engines which version to index when duplicates exist.
- Indexing — Storing a crawled page in a search engine's index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed.
- Thin Content — Pages with little unique value — auto-generated, scraped, doorway or near-duplicate pages that spam systems demote.
- robots.txt — A file at the site root that tells crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch. It controls crawling, not indexing.