noindex
A robots directive, delivered by meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header, that instructs search engines to drop a page from their index.
Crawling Indexingmeta robots
Robots meta tag
A `<meta name="robots">` element in the HTML head carrying per-page indexing and serving directives such as noindex, nofollow, nosnippet and max-image-preview.
In full
Directives can be addressed to all crawlers (`name="robots"`) or to a specific one (`name="googlebot"`), and multiple values are comma-separated. Beyond indexing control it governs snippet behaviour: nosnippet, max-snippet:[n], max-image-preview:[setting] and max-video-preview:[n]. When directives conflict, search engines apply the most restrictive one. It only works on HTML pages; for PDFs and images use the X-Robots-Tag header.
Example
`<meta name="robots" content="index, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large">` opts a publisher into full-length snippets and large image previews.
Related terms
X-Robots-Tag
An HTTP response header that carries the same robots directives as the meta robots tag, usable for any file type including PDFs and images.
rel="nofollow"
A link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through a link; since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a…
nosnippet / max-snippet
Robots directives controlling whether and how much of a page's text a search engine may show as a snippet or use in generated summaries.
data-nosnippet
An HTML attribute that excludes a specific span, div or section of a page from being used in Google's snippets while leaving the rest…
Where to read more
- Robots Meta Tags Specifications · Documentation · developers.google.com