The pages you want Google to ignore (noindex, follow)
2026-08-16
A common belief for beginners: put index, follow on every page so Google sees everything. That's actually a mistake. Some pages should be deliberately kept out of Google — and doing so protects your SEO instead of hurting it. The tool for that is one line: noindex, follow.
First, a relief: index, follow is the default. A normal page with no robots meta tag is already indexable and its links are followed, so you never need to add content="index, follow" — leaving it off does the same thing. The tag you actually reach for is the opposite.
What noindex, follow means
Put this in the page's <head>:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">noindex— "don't put this page in Google's results."follow— "but still crawl the links on it and pass authority to the pages they point to."
So the page disappears from search, but it's not a dead end — link equity still flows through it. (noindex, nofollow is rarely what you want; keep follow.)
Why hide some pages on purpose
- Crawl budget. Googlebot only spends so much time on your site. Every junk or duplicate page it crawls is time not spent on your real content — you want it reading your products and articles, not your password-reset page.
- Infinite junk URLs. If Google crawls a search box, it can generate endless thin pages —
/search?q=a,/search?q=ab, … — wasting crawl budget and looking spammy. - Bad UX & duplicates. Landing on another search-results page from Google is a poor experience, and duplicate pages split your ranking signals.
Which pages should be noindex, follow
Rule of thumb: if a page is useful to a human already on your site, but useless to someone searching Google, noindex it.
| Page type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Internal search results | /search?q=… |
| Account pages | /login, /signup, /forgot-password, /dashboard, /my-account |
| "Action done" pages | /thank-you, /success, /welcome |
| Legal / admin (optional) | /privacy, /terms, /data-deletion — fine to index, but many noindex them to keep Search Console focused |
| Printable / duplicate versions | the print-friendly copy of a page, so it doesn't compete with the real one |
Bonus: noindex means you can skip the schema
If a page is noindex, don't bother adding JSON-LD / structured data to it. Structured data only exists to make a page look good in search results — and Google never shows a noindexed page, so it will never use the schema. Save the effort (e.g. no SearchResultsPage schema on a noindexed search page).
The quick rule
- Real content people search for → leave it indexable (the default — no tag needed).
- Utility, thin, or duplicate pages →
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">.
Google: robots meta tag · Google: block indexing with noindex · Google: crawl budget
See also Every SEO tag and the sample site.