Block Search indexing with noindex
You can prevent a page or other resource from appearing in Google Search by including a noindex
meta tag or header in the HTTP
response. When Googlebot next crawls that page and sees the tag or header, Google will drop
that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.
Using noindex is useful if you don't have root access to your server, as it
allows you to control access to your site on a page-by-page basis.
Implementing noindex
There are two ways to implement noindex: as a meta tag and as an HTTP response
header. They have the same effect; choose the method that is more convenient for your site and
appropriate for the content type.
<meta> tag
To prevent most search engines from indexing a page on your site, place
the following meta tag into the <head> section of your page:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
To prevent only Google web crawlers from indexing a page:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
Be aware that some search engines might interpret the
noindex directive differently. As a result, it is possible that your page might
still appear in results from other search engines.
Read more about the noindex meta tag.
HTTP response header
Instead of a meta tag, you can also return an X-Robots-Tag header with a value of
either noindex or none in your response. A response header can
be used for non-HTML resources, such as PDFs, video files, and image files. Here's an example of an
HTTP response with an X-Robots-Tag instructing search engines not to index a page:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK (…) X-Robots-Tag: noindex (…)
Read more about the noindex response header.
Help us spot your meta tags
We have to crawl your page in order to see meta tags and HTTP headers. If a page is still appearing in results, it's probably because we haven't crawled the page since you added the tag. You can request that Google recrawl a page using the URL Inspection tool. Another reason could also be that the robots.txt file is blocking the URL from Google web crawlers, so they can't see the tag. To unblock your page from Google, you must edit your robots.txt file. You can edit and test your robots.txt using the robots.txt Tester tool.