Google: No Index Is A Directive, It Doesn't Control Crawling

May 25, 2017 - 8:22 am 61 by

Google Control Lines

There are many ways to control how Google crawls your web site but one of them is not the noindex tag. Google will still crawl your web site and web pages with the noindex tag on them. It needs to, in order to know what not to index. You can use robots.txt, nofollow, and other means to try to slow or prevent what Google picks up on but not the noindex tag.

John Mueller of Google said it again on Twitter saying the "noindex is an indexing directive, it doesn't control crawling."

Google has a huge help section on how you can control crawling of your web site. So read up on that for specifics.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 1, 2025

Jul 1, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google June 2025 Core Update Is Rolling Out - What We're Seeing So Far

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

New Google Search Console Insights Report

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:41 am
Spiders

Cloudflare To Block AI Crawlers By Default & Pay Per Crawl Model

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:31 am
Bing Search

Who Ate The Bing Search Results

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:21 am
Google AdSense

Google AdSense New Privacy Law & Opt-Out Mechanism

Jul 1, 2025 - 7:11 am
Previous Story: Google's New AdWords Interface To Launch To All By End Of Year