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.

 

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