Using Noindex, Nofollow HTML Metatags: How to Tell Google Not to Index a Page in Search

By lkolowich@hubspot.com (Lindsay Kolowich Cox)

Free Guide: How to Run a Technical SEO Audit

Indexing as many pages on your website as possible can be very tempting for marketers who are trying to boost their search engine authority.

But, while it’s true that publishing more pages that are relevant for a particular keyword (assuming they’re also high quality) will improve your ranking for that keyword, sometimes there’s actually more value in keeping certain pages on your website out of a search engine’s index.

… Say what?!

Stay with us, folks. This post will walk you through why you might want to remove certain webpages from the SERPs (search engine results pages), and exactly how to go about doing it.

De-Indexing a Page from Google

There are a few occasions where you may want to exclude a webpage — or a portion of a webpage — from search engine crawling and indexing like:

To prevent duplicate content (when there is more than one version of a page indexed by the search engines, as in a printer-friendly version of your content) from being indexed
To treat admin and login pages for internal use unless they’re meant to be used by a community
For a thank-you page (i.e., the page a visitor lands on after converting on one of your landing pages) where the visitor gets access to whatever offer that landing page promised, such as a link to an ebook PDF

Here’s what the thank-you page for our SEO tips ebook looks like, for example:

You want anyone who lands on your thank-you pages to get there because they’ve already filled out a form on a landing page — not because they found your thank-you page in search.

Why not? Because anyone who finds your thank-you page in search can access your lead-generating offers directly — without having to provide you with their information to pass through your lead-capture form. Any marketer who understands the value of landing pages understands how important it is to capture those visitors as leads first, before they can access your offers.

Bottom line: If your thank-you pages are easily discoverable through a simple Google search, you may be leaving valuable leads on the table.

What’s worse, you may even find that some of your highest-ranking pages for some of your long-tail keywords might be your thank-you pages — which means you could be inviting hundreds of potential leads to bypass your lead-capture forms. That’s a pretty compelling reason why you’d want to remove some of your web pages from SERPs.

So, how do you go about “de-indexing” certain pages from search engines? Here are three ways to do it.