What is Noindex?
Noindex is a robots meta tag directive that instructs search engines not to index a specific page. When applied, the page won't appear in search results even if other sites link to it. It's commonly implemented via a meta robots tag or HTTP X-Robots-Tag header.
When to Use Noindex
- Thin content pages that don't provide unique value
- Duplicate or near-duplicate pages
- Admin, login, and dashboard pages
- Thank you pages and form confirmation pages
- Internal search results pages
- Staging or test environments
Implementation
Add <meta name='robots' content='noindex'> to the page's <head> section, or use the X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header. In Next.js, set robots: { index: false } in your metadata export. Note: noindex pages still get crawled - they just aren't indexed.