# Noindex

A meta robots directive that requests a page not be included in the search engine index: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.

**Noindex** is a meta robots directive that explicitly requests that a page not be indexed by a search engine. It is generally implemented in two ways:

```
<!-- inside HTML head -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

<!-- in HTTP response header -->
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
```

For the noindex directive to work, **the bot must be able to crawl the page**. In other words, adding noindex to a page blocked by robots.txt is meaningless — the bot will not crawl the page and cannot see the tag.

Types of pages that should use noindex:

- Site search results pages  
- Most tag pages (if they do not provide real value)  
- Author archive pages  
- Filter/sort parameters  
- User-specific pages such as login, registration, account, and cart  
- Thank-you pages (after form submission)  
- Test environments or development pages  
- Low-quality or insufficient content (improve it first; if that is not possible, use noindex)

Common mistakes:

- Using robots.txt + noindex at the same time (the bot cannot see the tag)  
- Accidentally leaving important pages as noindex (common when moving from development to production)

**Tip:** Regularly check the “Pages > Excluded by noindex tag” report in Search Console. If a page you want indexed appears there, fix it immediately.