Technical SEO
Noindex
Noindex is a directive (a meta robots tag or HTTP header) that tells search engines not to include a page in their index, even though they can crawl it.
It suits pages with no search value, such as thank-you pages, internal search results, or thin tag archives. Note that a page blocked in robots.txt cannot be crawled, so the engine may never see the noindex; to deindex reliably, allow crawling and apply noindex.
The tag needs crawl access to work: block the page in robots.txt and the crawler never sees the noindex, so URLs can linger in the index for months, appearing with a "no information available" snippet. Deindex first, block after, if blocking is needed at all. The other trap is that long-noindexed pages eventually stop being crawled, so their links stop being followed; a page that should pass internal equity while staying out of the index is often better handled with a canonical instead.
Example
An online store lets users search internally, generating URLs like /search?q=red+shoes. Thousands of these thin result pages were getting indexed and diluting the site. Adding noindex to the search template removed them from Google's index within weeks while leaving them fully usable, and category pages took over the rankings those scraps had been splitting.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is my noindexed page still showing in Google?
- Usually because robots.txt blocks the page, so the crawler never fetched it and never saw the tag. Allow crawling, let the noindex be read, and the URL drops out over the following crawls. The other cause is simply waiting on recrawl timing.
- Which pages should carry a noindex tag?
- Pages with no search value: internal search results, thin tag archives, thank-you and confirmation pages, filtered duplicates, staging leftovers. Money pages and anything earning links should never carry one, and a stray noindex on a template is a classic silent traffic killer.
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