Term
noindex / nofollow
Robots directives that control whether a page gets indexed or its links followed. Set via the meta robots tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
noindex / nofollow — explained in more detail
noindex tells search engines not to add a URL to the index — it still gets crawled. nofollow tells them not to pass ranking signals to links on the page (at page level). Both are typically set via <meta name="robots"> or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header — the latter also works for non-HTML resources like PDFs.
Important: for Google to read noindex, the page must be crawlable. Combining Disallow in robots.txt with noindex on the page does not work — Google never sees the noindex.
Example / In practice
Typical uses: noindex on filter/sort URLs, staging pages, login areas, search-result pages. Per-link attributes rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" (paid), rel="ugc" (user-generated content) work at link granularity rather than for the entire page.
Distinction from similar terms
noindex ≠ Disallow in robots.txt: Disallow prevents crawling, noindex prevents indexing. A URL blocked via Disallow can still end up in the index — visible as a snippet without a description, because Google was never allowed to see the content.
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