Noindex and Nofollow – Glossary

Use noindex to keep a page out of search results after crawlers fetch it.

Use nofollow on links to avoid passing link signals to the destination. It does not block crawling or indexing.

Notes:

• robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. Use noindex on the page if it must not appear in results.
• nofollow is a per‑link hint, search engines may still crawl or index the target URL.

Example

Page and link examples:

<!-- Page-level: block indexing after crawlers fetch the page -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

<!-- HTTP header alternative (server config) -->
X-Robots-Tag: noindex

<!-- Link-level: do not pass link signals to the destination -->
<a href="https://example.com/login" rel="nofollow">Login</a>