Noindex tag

Of course, being easily findable on the Internet is important, but this may not apply to all pages. In this case, it is possible to create a noindex page. What is a noindex page and in what cases is it interesting? I discuss the concept in detail here.(1)

What is a noindex tag?

A noindex page is an HTML element that indicates that a search engine does not need to check a particular Web page. The page is still visible to visitors and also performs some function.

Note: A noindex tag is substantially different from blocking a page via the Robots.txt. A noindex tag prevents a page from being indexed. A disallow from the Robots.txt prevents full crawling of a page.

Reasons for implementing a noindex page

Findability of a website or page is one of the most important parts of search engine optimization, and it is also immediately the biggest challenge. But with a noindex page, you deliberately choose not to make a page findable by the search engine. The noindex element can be placed in the HTTP response header or in the metadata: it affects the visibility of a page in the search engines. why use this option? There are a number of reasons for this:

• With certain pages, excessive traffic is not desirable;
• There is a temporary page that also disappears;
• The information from that site does not reach the database(2).

The impact of a noindex tag on SEO

A noindex page definitely impacts the SEO of the page in question. It is not visible in the search results and therefore there is much less traffic. With noindex, you hide a page from the search engine.

In most cases, however, this is a conscious decision and the rest of the website does not suffer directly. However, it is important to have the page re-indexed when it is changed.

My advice

I recommend applying the noindex page only for specific reasons as described above. However, this is not always a reliable solution either: there are web crawlers that ignore this element and therefore still index the page.

It is also possible to completely remove a particular page from search results and cache, including by adding your website to Google webmaster tools.