Noindex
A rel=”noindex” directive is used to instruct search engines not to include a page within their index, to prevent it from appearing within search results. Our SEO Office Hours Notes below explain the use of this directive, along with further advice compiled from Google’s Office Hours sessions and real-world examples.
For more on noindex directives, check out our article: Noindex, Nofollow & Disallow.
Websites are Responsible for User Generated Content Quality
If you allow users to add content to a website, you are responsible for any content quality issues. You can use solutions like canonicals and noindex.
Large Numbers of Noindex Pages are OK
A large number of noindex pages are OK, provided you don’t want them to rank in search results.
Noindex Pages are Dropped Immediately After they are Processed
Noindex pages are dropped from the index immediately after they are processed, however processing can take some time to complete due to technical issues with Google.
Noindex Can be Used on Low Quality Pages to Prevent Penalties
You can noindex pages to prevent low quality pages affecting the Panda algorithm
Google Ingores Index and Follow
Google ignores index and follow tags because it’s the default.
Orphaned Pages may be Noindexed
Orphaned pages will be re-crawled, taking up some crawl budget, and usually remain indexed, and can still show up in search results but if there are no internal links then they will be considered unimportant, and they might eventually fall out of the index.
Use Noindex or Unavailable After for Past Events
For managing event pages after an event has occurred, add a noindex after the event, or add an unvailable after meta tag before the expiry which can help Google stop showing the pages.
PageRank to Noindex Pages is Passed On
PageRank from links to pages which are noindexed will still be passed on to other pages via internal links.
Use Linking and Noindex to Control Sitelinks
Google has removed the Remove Sitelink option in Search Console, as they had demoted the power of it, so you cannot remove them directly in any way. But you can change your internal linking, a clean navigation in particular, to promote pages, and use a noindex to remove any pages from Google’s index completely.
Noindex Search Results Pages and Nofollow Search Navigation
You should noindex your own search results pages as they are generally lower quality, but you can disallow them if they are causing a problem with the server load from being crawled. You can nofollow links on the search navigation to prevent crawling but you should probably have followed links on the results pages which can be useful for finding new pages if they are crawled.