Noindex Tag refers to the specific tag that directs the search engines to exclude the page from the indexing process, thus making it ineligible to appear for search results.
As soon as this tag has been found in the page’s HTML code, the search engine bot stops the page index even if it contains links to other websites. In general, the noindex tag allows increasing the relevancy of the page to search queries by reducing the share of secondary information and increasing keyword density, also, that’s a good way of hiding the duplicate content or unnecessary data.
One of the most common ways of excluding page index is to include a Meta Robots tag within the <head> tag of an HTML page with a “noindex” directive.
The cases when a “noindex” directive is used are as follows:
- pages with the sensitive information
- shopping carts or checkout pages (for the eCommerce sites)
- specific site versions for the A/B testing or other performance improvements
- pages that are still being developed
To make the most of the noindex tag use, it’s important to:
- Avoid including “noindex” on the critical pages, as they will be excluded from the SERP and won’t receive any organic traffic.
- Prevent using “noindex” for the pages that contain the links which should be crawled.
- Consider excluding “noindex” for the robots.txt files
