Block Search inde xing withnoindex

noindexis a rule set with either a<meta> tag or HTTP response header and is used to prevent inde xing content by search engines that support thenoindexrule, such as Google. When Googlebot crawls that page and extracts the tag or header, Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.

Usingnoindexis useful if you don't have root access to your server, as it allows you to control access to your site on a page-by-page basis.

Implementingnoindex

There are two ways to implementnoindex:as a<meta>tag and as an HTTP response header. They have the same effect; choose the method that is more convenient for your site and appropriate for the content type. Specifying the noindexrule in the robots.txt file is not supported by Google.

You can also combine thenoindexrule with other rules that control inde xing. For example, you can join anofollowhint with anoindexrule: <meta name= "robots" content= "noindex, nofollow"/>.

<meta>tag

To preventall search enginesthat support thenoindexrule from inde xing a page on your site, place the following<meta>tag into the <head>section of your page: 

<meta name= "robots"content=" noindex ">

To preventonly Google web crawlersfrom inde xing a page:

<meta name= "googlebot"content=" noindex ">

Be aware that some search engines might interpret the noindexrule differently. As a result, it is possible that your page might still appear in results from other search engines.

Read more about thenoindex<meta>tag.

HTTP response header

Instead of a<meta>tag, you can return anX-Robots-Tag HTTP header with a value of eithernoindexornonein your response. A response header can be used for non-HTML resources, such as PDFs, video files, and image files. Here's an example of an HTTP response with anX-Robots-Tagheader instructing search engines not to index a page: 

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
(...)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
(...)

Read more about thenoindexresponse header.

Debuggingnoindexissues

We have to crawl your page in order to see<meta>tags and HTTP headers. If a page is still appearing in results, it's probably because we haven't crawled the page since you added thenoindexrule. Depending on the importance of the page on the internet, it may take months for Googlebot to revisit a page. You can request that Google recrawl a page using the URL Inspection tool.

If you need to remove a page of your site quickly from Google's search results, see our documentation about removals.

Another reason could also be that the robots.txt file is blocking the URL from Google web crawlers, so they can't see the tag. To unblock your page from Google, you must edit your robots.txt file.

Finally, make sure that thenoindexrule is visible to Googlebot. To test if your noindeximplementation is correct, use the URL Inspection tool to see the HTML that Googlebot received while crawling the page. You can also use the Page Inde xing report in Search Console to monitor the pages on your site from which Googlebot extracted a noindexrule.