Noindex
A rel=”noindex” directive is used to instruct search engines not to include a page within their index, to prevent it from appearing within search results. Our SEO Office Hours Notes below explain the use of this directive, along with further advice compiled from Google’s Office Hours sessions and real-world examples.
For more on noindex directives, check out our article: Noindex, Nofollow & Disallow.
Expired Content Can be Redirected, 404’d or Noindexed
There is no one correct way to deal with expired content on a site. If there is a relevant page that replaces the expired one then you can implement a 301 redirect. If there is no replacement page, then you can leave the page as 200 saying that it is no longer valid and use either a 404 or noindex after a period of time.
A Noindex Reduces Crawl Rate
A page with a noindex tag will be crawled less frequently.
Noindex or Roll up Empty Search Pages to Avoid Poor User Experience
John recommends noindexing empty search pages on your site to avoid users landing on page with no entries or results e.g. a location specific service with no entries for that specific location. Alternatively, you might want to consider rolling these empty pages up to a higher level category.
Ensure Google Can Access Linked Content on Canonicalised Pages
Fine to noindex paginated pages (e.g. after page 2) but need to make sure that Google can still get to the content linked on these pages via other routes in your internal linking structure (e.g. related products/content, category pages).
Adding Noindex To Pages Further Down In Paginated Series Is Fine
It is ok to noindex further down in a paginated series. This can be noindexing all pages after the first couple or first hundred, it is up to the webmaster. However, crawl budget will not be impacted as Googlebot still crawls these noindex pages.
Google Takes Rel Canonical To Be Mistake If Present With Noindex
If a canonical and noindex are both present on a page, Google’s algorithms judge the rel canonical to be a mistake and the noindex as being used as a way to force a canonical.
Google Does Look at Overall Quality of Websites
Google does occasionally look at the overall quality of websites which are made up of the quality of the individual pages on that site, so if a large proportion of pages are low quality, that will reflect how Google sees the website as a whole. You can noindex low quality content but best solution is to improve on it.
Google Can Take Time to See Pages with NoIndex Tag
Google can take time to drop pages with noindex tag from index, especially on larger sites or if the URL is blocked by robots.txt
Noindexed Pages Don’t Impact Site Quality
Site quality is only measured on indexable pages. If the quality of pages cannot be improved, you can use a noindex on low quality pages.
Internal Search Pages Should Not Be Indexable
Google recommends you block internal search from being indexed as will likely increase number of pages indexed for that site and can be be inefficient for crawling and indexing