Noindex

Updated on Dec 06, 2023

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The noindex value of an HTML robots meta tag requests that automated Internet bots avoid indexing a web page. Reasons why one might want to use this meta tag include advising robots not to index a very large database, webpages that are very transitory, pages that one wishes to keep slightly more private, or the printer and mobile-friendly versions of pages. Since the burden of honoring a website's noindex tag lies with the author of the search robot, sometimes these tags are ignored. Also the interpretation of the noindex tag is sometimes slightly different from one search engine company to the next.

Noindexing entire pages

Possible values for the meta tag content are: "none", "all", "index", "noindex", "nofollow", and "follow". A combination of the values is also possible, for example:

Bot-specific directives

The noindex directive can be restricted only to certain bots by specifying a different "name" value in the meta tag.

For example, to specifically block Google's bot, specify:

Or, to block Yahoo!'s bot, specify:

Or, to block MSN's bot, specify:

robots.txt file

Entire Web pages can also be noindexed using a robots.txt file.

Noindexing part of a page

It is also possible to exclude part of a Web page, for example navigation text, from being indexed rather than the whole page. There are various techniques for doing this; it is possible to use several in combination. Google's main indexing spider, Googlebot, is not known to recognize any of these techniques.

tag

The Russian search engine Yandex introduced a new <noindex> tag which prevents indexing of the content between the tags. To allow the source code to validate,  alternatively can be used:

Other indexing spiders also recognize the <noindex> tag, including Atomz.

microformat

There is a 2005 draft microformats specification with the same functionality. The Robot Exclusion Profile looks for the attribute value class="robots-noindex" in HTML tags:

A combination of values is also possible, for example:

Yahoo!

In 2007, Yahoo! introduced similar functionality to the microformat into its spider. However, Yahoo!'s spider is incompatible in that it looks for the attribute value class="robots-nocontent" and only this value: