The noindex meta tag tells search engines not to include a page in their index. Used correctly, it keeps low-value pages out of search and focuses your crawl budget on what matters.
How to implement it:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
You can combine directives: noindex, nofollow tells Google not to index the page and not to follow its links. noindex, follow prevents indexing while still allowing link signals to flow.
When to use noindex:
- Thank you pages and confirmation pages (post-purchase, post-signup)
- Internal search results pages
- Tag and category archive pages with thin content
- Staging environments and development URLs that accidentally get crawled
- Paginated pages beyond page 2 or 3 (debated, but common)
- Login and account pages
- Duplicate content you cannot canonicalize away
Pages you should never accidentally noindex:
Your homepage. Your main product or service pages. Your best-performing blog posts. Any page you want to rank. It sounds obvious but noindex applied via a CMS template can silently remove hundreds of pages from Google at once — this is one of the most common catastrophic SEO mistakes.
How to verify: Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to check whether Google has indexed a specific page. A page with noindex will show as "URL is not on Google."
Noindex is not the same as blocking a page in robots.txt. A robots.txt disallow prevents Google from crawling the page but the URL can still appear in search if it has backlinks. Noindex prevents the page from appearing in results even if Google can access it.