What Is a Noindex Tag?
A noindex tag is a directive, added either as a meta tag in a page’s HTML or as an HTTP header, that tells search engines not to include that page in their index.
When to Use It
Noindex is appropriate for pages you want accessible to users but don’t want appearing in search results — thank-you pages, internal search results pages, staging or duplicate content, thin tag or filter pages, and similar low-value URLs that would otherwise dilute your site’s overall quality signals if indexed.
How It Differs from a Robots.txt Block
A robots.txt disallow rule prevents a page from being crawled in the first place — but if the page is already indexed or gets linked to elsewhere, it can sometimes still appear in results with limited information. A noindex tag, by contrast, requires the page to be crawled so the directive itself can be read, but then reliably keeps it out of the index entirely. For pages you specifically want removed from search results, noindex is the more reliable tool.
