• BBgmoro

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Turn SEO data into actionable content briefs

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Get found
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
          Moz API

          Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Which pages to "noindex"

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Which pages to "noindex"

        Technical SEO
        5
        7
        12742
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • mmaes
          mmaes last edited by

          I have read through the many articles regarding the use of Meta Noindex, but what I haven't been able to find is a clear explanation of when, why or what to use this on.

          I'm thinking that it would be appropriate to use it on:

          legal pages such as privacy policy and terms of use
          search results page
          blog archive and category pages

          Thanks for any insight of this.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • KeriMorgret
            KeriMorgret @mmaes last edited by

            Here are two posts that may be helpful in both explaining how to set up a robots.txt for wordpress, and the thinking behind setting up which parts to exclude.

            http://www.cogentos.com/bloggers-guide-to-using-robotstxt-and-robots-meta-tags-to-optimise-indexing/

            http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization

            The wordpress link (second link) has a link to several other resources as well.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • mmaes
              mmaes @KeriMorgret last edited by

              Yes I'm using wordpress.

              KeriMorgret 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • KeriMorgret
                KeriMorgret last edited by

                You also want to block any admin directory, plugin directory, etc. Are you using Wordpress or a specific CMS? There are often best-practice posts for robots.txt files for specific platforms.

                mmaes 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • TellThemEverything
                  TellThemEverything last edited by

                  yes, generally you would noindex your about us, contact us, privacy, terms pages since these are rarely searched and in fact are so heavily linked to internally that they would rank well if indexed.

                  all search results should be noindexed - google wants to do the search 🙂

                  definitely NOT blog/category pages - these are your gold content!

                  I also noindex any URL accessed by https

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -4
                  • CPU
                    CPU last edited by

                    As well as pagination pages I have read, but not done it myself, that you should consider using it on low value pages that you are wouldn't want to rank above other pages on the site (hopefully they wouldn't anyway) and also sitemaps as don't necessarily want them to appear in the index but definitely want them followed.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • Theo-NL
                      Theo-NL last edited by

                      Noindexed pages are pages that you want your link juices flowing through, but not have them rank as individual entries in the search engines.

                      • I think your legal pages should rank as individual pages. If I wanted to find your privacy policy and searched for 'privacy policy company name', I'd expect to find an entry where I can click and find your privacy policy

                      • Your search results page (the internal ones) are great candidates for a noindex attribute. If a search engine robot happens to stumble upon one (via a link from somebody else for example), you'd want the spider to start crawling pages from there and spreading link juice over your site. However, under most circumstances you don't want this result page to rank on itself in the search engines, as it usually offers thin value to your visitors

                      • Blog archive and category pages are useful pages to visitors and I personally wouldn't noindex these

                      Bonus: your paginated results ('page 2+ in a result set that has multiple pages') are great candidates for noindex. It'll keep the juices running, without having all these pretty much meaningless (and highly dynamic) pages in the search index.

                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Browse Questions

                      Explore more categories

                      • Moz Tools

                        Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                      • SEO Tactics

                        Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                      • Community

                        Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                      • Digital Marketing

                        Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                      • Research & Trends

                        Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                      • Support

                        Connect on product support and feature requests.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • webbeemoz

                        I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?

                        seo consulting seo expert seo page treatment

                        Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
                        website.com/product1/pricing
                        website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks

                        Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
                        1
                      • Train4Academy.co.uk

                        Customer Reviews on Product Page / Pagination / Crawl 3 review pages only

                        reviews pagination crawler disallow

                        Hi experts, I present customer feedback, reviews basically, on my website for the products that are sold. And with this comes the ability to read reviews and obviously with pagination to display the available reviews. Now I want users to be able to flick through and read the reviews to help them satisfy whatever curiosity they have. My only thinking is that the page that contains the reviews, with each click of the pagination will present roughly the same content. The only thing that changes is the title tags which will contain the number in the H1 to display the page number. I'm thinking this could be duplication but i have yet to be notified by Google in my Search console... Should i block crawlers from crawling beyond page 3 of reviews? Thanks

                        Technical SEO | | Train4Academy.co.uk
                        0
                      • hampgunn

                        SEO advice on ecommerce url structure where categories contain "/c/"

                        Hi! We use Hybris as plattform and I would like input on which url to choose. We must keep "/c/" before the actual category. c stands for category. I.e. this current url format will be shortened and cleaned:
                        https://www.granngarden.se/Sortiment/Husdjur/Hund/Hundfoder-%26-Hundmat/c/hundfoder To either: a. 
                        https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/hundfoder/c/hundfoder b.
                        https://www.granngarden.se/husdjur/hund/c/hundfoder (hundfoder means dogfood) The question is whether we should keep the duplicated category name (hundfoder) before the "/c/" or not. Will there be SEO disadvantages by removing the duplicate "hundfoder" before the "/c/"? I prefer the shorter version ofc, but do not want to jeopardize any SEO rankings or send confusing signals to search engines or customers due to the "/c/" breaking up the url breadcrumb. What do you guys say and prefer from the above alternatives? Thanks /Hampus

                        Technical SEO | | hampgunn
                        0
                      • BrianAlpert78

                        Does a no-indexed parent page impact its child pages?

                        If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!

                        Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert78
                        1
                      • O2C

                        Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.

                        Hi All, I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix. They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area. For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc. I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it. I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages. Thanks

                        Technical SEO | | O2C
                        0
                      • Rignite

                        Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages

                        Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content.  And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!

                        Technical SEO | | Rignite
                        0
                      • reallyitsme

                        Adding 'NoIndex Meta' to Prestashop Module & Search pages.

                        Hi Looking for a fix for the PrestaShop platform Look for the definitive answer on how to best stop the indexing of PrestaShop modules such as "send to a friend", "Best Sellers" and site search pages. We want to be able to add a meta noindex ()to pages ending in: /search?tag=ball&p=15 or /modules/sendtoafriend/sendtoafriend-form.php We already have in the robot text: Disallow: /search.php
                        Disallow: /modules/ (Google seems to ignore these) But as a further tool we would like to incude the noindex to all these pages too to stop duplicated pages. I assume this needs to be in either the head.tpl or the .php file of each PrestaShop module.? Or is there a general site wide code fix to put in the metadata to apply' Noindex Meta' to certain files. Current meta code here: Please reply with where to add code and what the code should be. Thanks in advance.

                        Technical SEO | | reallyitsme
                        0
                      • Zitana

                        Meta tag "noindex,nofollow" by accident

                        Hi, 3 weeks ago I wanted to release a new website (made in WordPress), so I neatly created 301 redirects for all files and folders of my old html website and transferred the WordPress site into the index folder. Job well done I thought, but after a few days, my site suddenly disappeared from google. I read in other Q&A's that this could happen so I waited a little longer till I finally saw today that there was a meta robots added on every page with "noindex, nofollow". For some reason, the WordPress setting "I want to forbid search engines, but allow normal visitors to my website" was selected, although I never even opened that section called "Privacy". So my question is, will this have a negative impact on my pagerank afterwards? Thanks, Sven

                        Technical SEO | | Zitana
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      • Digital Marketers
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2026 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.