Google To Officially Stop Supporting NoIndex Directives from Robots.txt


The search engine giant is officially going to stop obeying robots.txt noindex directive starting 1 Sep 2019. Publishers still using robots.txt noindex directive will be required to use an alternative to stop Google from crawling or indexing their pages. According to the company, Google never documented unsupported robots.txt rules such as nofollow, crawl-delay, and noindex. And since Google Bots used to support it unofficially in the past, it will not be the case hereafter.

Google announced to withdraw robots.txt directive support on 2 July 2019, through a post on Google Webmasters Blog. The company confirmed that robtos.txt noindex was never officially supported by Google and starting today, the crawlers will also stop supporting it. Google shared the blog through twitter bidding its goodbyes to the unsupported robots.txt rules.

Alternate Ways From Google to Control Indexing

Google published 5 alternative methods to control crawling on its official blog:

  • Noindex in robots meta tags: While robots.txt noindex is no more supported, meta tags with noindex directive in either HTML header codes or HTTP response headers have become the most effective way to stop URLs from indexing. 
  • 404 and 410 HTTP status codes: These status codes inform the search engines that the page on respective URL does not exist. Google automatically drops these URLs after crawling them once.
  • Password protection: If a page is hiding behind a login, Google will drop it from the index unless the password protection indicates either paywalled content or subscription.
  • Disallow in robots.txt: If the search engines don’t know about a page because they were blocked from being crawled, it implies that their content won’t be indexed. Search engines may index a URL if other pages have links to it but Google aims to make pages less visible if the crawlers cannot see the content.
  • Search Console Remove URL tool: The tool is widely known for temporarily removing a URL from Google’s search results.


Make sure you are not using robots.txt noindex on any pages. If you are, we recommend you to immediately use one of the above-mentioned methods to avoid your pages from indexing.
 

Related Post

blog
Check Out The Biggest SEO Myths That You Should Definitely Leave Behind!!

SEO is an area in our life which is flooded with so many myths and misconceptions every day due to the ignorance, fear and the hunt for quick results. People are more prone to choosing quicker methods with the long-term results. However, the damage sometimes...

blog
The Possibilities Are Infinite In Development

It might be difficult to keep up with the ever changing web development and the changes as they get on the nerves of many. While some of the changes are temporary and short lived, while some of them are revolutionary and results in dramatic changes...

blog
Celebration Of International Men’s Day 2018

Fun and Happiness are contagious and happy employees are the healthiest, so, at Leading Edge, we don’t miss any opportunity to have fun at the workplace. We believe in investing time and efforts so that our workplace becomes an enjoyable place for each one of...

© 2023 Leading Edge Info Solutions (P) Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

To Top
Book a Slot