What is a no-index tag?

Rate this post

Whether you still have to create XML sitemaps manually or you use a plugin tool like Yoast that automatically creates your XML, it can be rather easy to omit the pages you don’t want indexed from your sitemap.

In Yoast, it is simply the click of a button under

each of the various taxonomies and page types in the settings section.As for a manual build, simply do not include the URLs you don’t want in the file you are creating.  Be sure to add a ‘noindex’ tag to the pages  you phone number lead are excluding to ensure they are not found. Just because you didn’t include the page in the XML doesn’t mean a crawl bot can’t find them!

A noindex tag is a meta tag placed in the code of a page that tells search engines to move on and NOT crawl this particular page when it finds it on it’s crawling mission.

These tags are extremely powerful and can take down your website with the click of a mouse so PLEASE be careful if you are executing these types of changes without webmaster supervision!

It is really easy to determine if you have a noindex tag on a page:

Right-click the webpage you want to check for a noindex tag

  1. Select “Inspect Source/Code”
  2. A new window will open with tons of scary lines of code. Simply hit Ctrl+F and type ‘noindex’
    1. If you get 0/0 the page has no tag and chine directory search engines can and will likely find it

Search engines are smart. If you submit a sitemap with a page in it marked as ‘noindex’ they will call you on it and report the error to Google Search Console, the one source for monitoring the index status of your website. So be sure you have your website set up and verified with GSC. This will greatly assist you as you work through this exercise the best tutorials for phone photo editing with your website and allow you to monitor your website daily.

Submit Your Sitemap for Indexing

Once you’ve made all the adjustments you wish to your XML sitemap, (and setup and verified your GSC account) it is time to submit that bad boy for indexing! Navigate to the Sitemaps section of GSC and hit ‘Submit’! Your sitemap will likely go into ‘Pending’ status but in a short time (sometimes hours, sometimes days) you’ll start to see what Google, and therefore the world, is seeing of your website.

Scroll to Top