What is a Noindex Attribute?
A Noindex is an HTML attribute that gives a directive to search engines such as Google, telling them not to index a particular page.
Where in the code is a Noindex Placed?
The Noindex directive is placed in the <head> section of a page and looks as follows:
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex”>
What is the Impact of Having the Noindex Directive?
A page with this attribute will not be indexed and therefore will not be on the search results page.
The page is, however, crawled by search engines.
For the Noindex attribute to be effective, the page must not be blocked by a robots.txt file and must be accessible to the crawler.
Why Use it?
- To prevent administrative pages from being indexed. These include Admin login pages, dashboards, etc.
- On duplicate pages. If you have pages that have similar content, you can place the noindex attribute on one of them to prevent cannibalization.
- Thin content pages. If a page has very little content, you can block it from being indexed.
You will be doing all this to ensure users do not end up on such pages and having a bad experience, which in turn would hurt your SEO efforts.
