3 ways to stop your web pages being indexed

9th December 2009 by Tom Hallett

One of the main aims of SEO is to increase the visibility of your website in the search engines so you get more visitors to your pages from organic search.

However, there may be times when you want to stop some (or maybe all) of your pages from being indexed in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Maybe parts of your site are duplicated (like ‘print friendly’ pages).  Or you might want to stop search results pages from your internal search being indexed.

Here are 3 ways to stop a web page from being indexed:

1. Robots.txt

Before a search engine bot crawls your website, they will look for a text file at the root of your domain. The robots.txt should tell them what pages they are allowed to index when they crawl the site.

However, some robots may ignore the robots.txt. And it’s not a good idea to block ‘secret’ pages using robots.txt as anyone can access it at www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt and see what pages you’ve blocked.

2. ‘Noindex’ metatag

The noindex metatag looks like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Simply add this code in the <head> section on any pages you don’t want indexed. However, you can only use this on html pages – you won’t be able to use the noindex tag to block out PDFs, Flash files or Word Documents etc.

Be aware that some bots will continue to index pages with the noindex metatag. And it’s not a reliable way to make links on a page ‘nofollow’.

3. Password protect pages

If you have pages that you only want certain people to access, password protecting them will restrict access to unwanted visitors and the search engine bots.

This is a good solution for restricting sections of your site that are in development.

Related Posts

  1. XML Sitemaps – do they really get pages indexed?
  2. Sitemap.xml can get pages Indexed, but not Ranking
  3. Three Ways to keep a Web Page out of the Search Engines
  4. SEO Speak: How do search engines find my pages?
  5. Why Is My Development Site Indexed?
  6. Google Adwords Bot and Robots.txt
  7. Including Stop Words In Your Search
  8. Development websites and Google

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