How do I add a noindex meta tag, and what do the values mean?

Updated October 21, 2026 · Check Before Publish

Add <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> to the page, or send an X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header for non-HTML files. Google drops the page from results the next time it crawls it, so robots.txt must not block the page. noindex, nofollow adds “Do not follow the links on this page.”

The short version

• Google: “Both the name and the content attributes are case-insensitive.” The tag goes in the page's head, and Google says it “doesn't enforce placement of meta robots in the HTML head and will respect robots meta tags in the body section of an HTML document as well.”
• A meta tag and an HTTP header have the same effect. For non-HTML resources, Google says “use the X-Robots-Tag response header instead”.
• What happens: “Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.” That needs a recrawl: “it may take months for Googlebot to revisit a page.”
• If robots.txt blocks the page, “the crawler will never see the noindex rule, and the page can still appear in search results”. Google also says “Specifying the noindex rule in the robots.txt file is not supported by Google.”
• none is “Equivalent to noindex, nofollow.” all is the default and “has no effect if explicitly listed”.

The syntax

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

X-Robots-Tag: noindex
X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: noindex

• robots addresses all crawlers. Google reads two tokens besides it: “googlebot: for all text results” and “googlebot-news: for news results”, and says “other values are ignored”.
• Combine rules with commas in one tag, or use several tags. “Any rule that can be used in a robots meta tag can also be specified as an X-Robots-Tag.” The header may name a crawler first, as in X-Robots-Tag: googlebot: noindex, and “The HTTP header, the user agent name, and the specified values are not case sensitive.”
• Conflicts: “In the case of conflicting robots rules, the more restrictive rule applies.” If tags for different crawlers disagree, “the search engine will use the sum of the negative rules”: robots: nofollow plus googlebot: noindex is read by Googlebot as noindex, nofollow.
• In a server config the header looks like add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"; in nginx, which is Google's own example for PDF files.

What the values mean

Google does not list index or follow as values; the only default it names is all. Other engines can read rules differently: Google itself says rules “may not be treated the same by all other search engines”.

Bing

Bing documents noindex and says: “Note that we need to be able to crawl the page to see this tag, so do not block access to the page.” You can replace the generic name with bingbot “to limit the meta tag to only apply to Bing”. The current Bing help page we read does not define nofollow; the only official Bing-side text we found that does is a 2008 post written jointly with Google and Yahoo.

Check a page

Paste the URL. The checker reads the meta robots and googlebot tags and the X-Robots-Tag header, shows the exact line it found, and flags conflicting instructions.

What we tested

On 2026-10-19 we ran the live Meta, Canonical & Noindex Checker on 20 small test pages we built for this guide. Each carries only the signals named below. The pages are on a throwaway preview, not part of this site.

Two results are worth knowing. A noindex added by JavaScript is invisible to the checker, and Google says that for noindex it “may skip rendering and JavaScript execution”, so do not rely on a script to add or remove the tag. And the checker rates every noindex as “Review”, not “Fix”, because it cannot know whether you meant it.

Make sure it worked

1. Run the check above and confirm the line you expect, and no other noindex from a plugin, a theme or a header you forgot about.
2. In Search Console, use URL Inspection to “see the HTML that Googlebot received while crawling the page”. The Page indexing report shows pages where Googlebot found a noindex under the status “URL marked 'noindex'”.
3. Be patient: until Google recrawls the page it can still appear. To remove a page from results quickly, Google points to its removal tools.

What this can't tell you

It does not run JavaScript, and it reads the page from our server, not Google's. We did not test Bing-specific tags such as bingbot. Whether and when a search engine drops the page is up to the engine.

Related: Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag (the Search Console status), noindex and canonical together and Blocked by robots.txt.

Fixed this one? Before you send people to the page, run the full pre-publish check for everything else: indexing signals, link preview, broken links, alt text, structured data and HTTPS in one pass.