noindex

noindex

The noindex HTML meta tag advises automated Internet bots to avoid indexing a Web page. There are a multitude of reasons why one might want to use this tag. These include preventing robots from trying to index very large database or pages that are very transitory, ones that one wishes to keep slightly more private, or the printer and mobile-friendly versions of webpages. Since the burden of honoring a website's noindex tag lies with the author of the search robot, sometimes these tags are willfully ignored. Also the interpretation of the noindex tag is sometimes slightly different from one search engine company to the next.

Contents

Example

<html>
<head>
 <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
 <title>Don't index this page</title>
</head>

Russian version

Russian search engine Yandex introduce a new tag which only prevents indexing of the content between the tags, not a whole Web page.

<body>
  Do index this text block.
  <noindex>Don't index this text block</noindex>
</body>

Bot-specific Directives

There are ways to send the noindex directive only for certain bots, typically by using a different "name" value.

For example, to specifically block Google's bot,[1] specify

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex" />

or to block Yahoo!'s bot,[2] specify

<meta name="Slurp" content="noindex" />

See also

References

  1. ^ Using meta tags to block access to your site, Google Webmasters Tools Help
  2. ^ How to Prevent Yahoo! Search From Indexing Specific Pages, Yahoo! Search Help

External links


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