Newnessimworks.com
Glossary · SEO

noindex

An HTML meta directive telling search engines not to include a page in their index, even if they crawl it.

Definition

In long form.

Implemented as `<meta name="robots" content="noindex">` in HTML or as an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Use noindex for thin pages, internal search results, staging pages, thank-you pages, and other URLs that shouldn't appear in search but might be linked. Critical: don't combine noindex with robots.txt blocking — if Google can't crawl the page, it can't see the noindex directive, and the URL may still appear in search with no snippet.

In context

On Next.js sites we use the metadata.robots field to apply noindex selectively to /admin, /preview, internal tools, and any other pages that shouldn't be public-search-visible.

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