noindex
A directive that tells search engines to keep a page out of their index while still allowing it to be crawled.
noindex is a directive that asks search engines not to include a page in their index. You set it with a meta robots tag (<meta name="robots" content="noindex">) or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. Use it for thank-you pages, internal search results, staging content, and other pages that should exist but never rank.
For noindex to work, the page must be crawlable. If you also block it in robots.txt, Google cannot fetch the page, cannot see the noindex tag, and may keep a URL-only listing in results. Control indexing with noindex; control crawling with robots.txt — do not combine them for the same URL.
Never list noindex URLs in your sitemap. A sitemap says "please index these," so including a noindex page contradicts itself and can trigger coverage warnings in Search Console.
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