How to add noindex#
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">Or as an HTTP header (useful for PDFs): X-Robots-Tag: noindex. In WordPress, use your SEO plugin’s per-page setting or this theme’s “Hide from search engines” checkbox in the SEO panel.
Pages that are often noindexed#
- Thank-you, confirmation and checkout pages
- Internal search results
- Thin tag, date and author archives
- Login, account and cart pages
- Staging sites (use password protection too)
- Landing pages built only for paid campaigns
Common mistakes#
- Blocking the page in robots.txt as well — Google can’t crawl it, so it never sees the noindex, and the URL may stay indexed.
- Forgetting staging settings — launching with “Discourage search engines” still ticked noindexes the whole site.
- Noindexing paginated archives that are the only path to older posts.
- Keeping noindexed pages in the sitemap — sitemaps should list indexable URLs only.
Removal takes effect after Google recrawls the page. For urgent cases, Search Console’s Removals tool hides a URL temporarily (about six months) while noindex takes effect. Related: meta robots tag, noindex in WordPress.