A directive that instructs search engines not to include a page in their index.
ID
SS-DF-022
Confidence
High · 91
Evidence
Strong
Updated
2026-07-08
Definition
A directive that instructs search engines not to include a page in their index.
Noindex is a robots directive, delivered via a meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, that tells search engines to exclude a page from their index even if it is crawled. Unlike robots.txt, the page must remain crawlable for the directive to be seen, so the two should not be combined on the same URL. It is the correct tool for keeping thin, duplicate or private-but-public pages such as internal search results out of the index.