Noindex
TL;DR
A noindex directive tells search engines not to include a page in the index, even though it still gets crawled.
Set noindex via a meta tag (<meta name="robots" content="noindex">) or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Use it for pages with no SEO value or actual harm: thank-you pages, login screens, search-result URLs, staging environments. Unlike robots.txt, noindex blocks indexing reliably.
Example
A shop noindexes search-result URLs (/search?q=...) since they're not valuable for organic visitors and would otherwise consume crawl budget.
Frequently asked questions
Noindex or robots.txt disallow?
Noindex if you want the page to be crawled (to see the tag) but not indexed. Disallow if you don't want Google to fetch the URL at all — but note: disallow can still lead to indexing via external links.
Related terms
Further reading
- → Our service: SEO
- → Blog: What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization explained