What is noindex?

How it works

A page carries a tag such as meta name robots content noindex. When a search engine crawls the page and sees it, it drops the page from its results or never adds it. Pages already listed disappear after the next crawl. The rest of the site is unaffected unless it carries the tag too.

Noindex versus robots.txt

Robots.txt tells crawlers which addresses not to fetch; noindex tells them not to list a page they fetched. They do different jobs, and combining them badly backfires: if robots.txt blocks a page, crawlers never see its noindex tag, and the page can still appear in results as a bare link if other sites link to it.

When to use it

Thank you and confirmation pages, internal search results, draft sections, client only pages, duplicate print versions and a whole site that is still being built. It keeps thin or private pages out of results without taking them offline or breaking links you have sent people.

Common mistakes

Leaving noindex on after launch, the most common reason a new site never shows in Google. Using noindex for private information, which stays reachable to anyone with the link. And noindexing a page while also blocking it in robots.txt, so search engines never see the tag.

Where it shows up in OneCraft

The Search and sharing card has Hide from search engines, which adds noindex to every page and empties the sitemap while the site stays online. Each page also has its own Hide from search engines switch in the builder Page tab. The robots.txt of a published site blocks only the thank you page, and the store thank you and offline pages are marked noindex.

Questions people ask