Glossary · technical-seo
What is Noindex?
Noindex is an instruction, placed in a page's robots meta tag or sent as an HTTP header, telling search engines not to include that page in their results. Google still has to crawl the page to see the instruction, so a noindexed page must not also be blocked in robots.txt. It is the right tool for pages that should exist but should not be found through search: thank-you pages, internal search results, login and cart pages, staging copies and thin tag archives. Used by mistake on real pages, it silently removes them from Google.
What does Noindex mean for a business in Pakistan?
WordPress has a setting labelled Discourage search engines from indexing this site, which developers tick during building and forget. We have seen Pakistani business sites carry it for months after launch. It adds noindex to every page, and no amount of content or links will rank a site while it is on.
A worked example
An Islamabad e-commerce store wants its order confirmation page kept out of Google, so it adds a noindex tag there and leaves the page crawlable. Separately, Search Console's Page indexing report shows its whole blog marked Excluded by noindex tag, set by an SEO plugin's default for one post type. Changing that setting brings the blog back.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- Robots.txtrobots fileRobots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers which parts of the site they may and may not request. It works by naming…
- IndexingindexingIndexing is Google storing a copy of your page so it can be shown in results. It is the step after crawling: a bot visits the page, then Google…
- Canonical tagcanonical tagA canonical tag is a line in a page's HTML head, written as link rel="canonical", that tells search engines which web address is the main version of…
- Google Search Consolesearch consoleGoogle Search Console is Google's free tool for website owners. It shows which search queries your pages appeared for, how many impressions and…
- Thin contentkamzor contentThin content is a page that gives a visitor little or nothing of value: a few lines of filler, copied manufacturer text, an auto-generated page with…
Noindex — quick answers
What does Noindex mean?
Noindex is an instruction, placed in a page's robots meta tag or sent as an HTTP header, telling search engines not to include that page in their results. Google still has to crawl the page to see the instruction, so a noindexed page must not also be blocked in robots.txt.
Noindex ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
نو انڈیکس — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "noindex tag". WordPress has a setting labelled Discourage search engines from indexing this site, which developers tick during building and forget.
Why does Noindex matter for a business in Pakistan?
WordPress has a setting labelled Discourage search engines from indexing this site, which developers tick during building and forget. We have seen Pakistani business sites carry it for months after launch. It adds noindex to every page, and no amount of content or links will rank a site while it is on.
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