Glossary · Technical
Noindex.
An instruction telling search engines not to keep a page in their index. It is set in the page itself or in the server response, not in robots.txt.
Why it matters.
The distinction matters and trips people up constantly: robots.txt stops a page being crawled, noindex stops it being listed. A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results with no description, because the crawler was never allowed in to read the instruction telling it to stay out. To remove a page from search, allow crawling and use noindex.
How to check it yourself.
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and read what comes back. Anything listed that should not be public — staging copies, thank-you pages, internal PDFs — needs noindex, not a robots.txt rule.
Questions
Straight answers.
How do I check noindex on my own site?
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and read what comes back. Anything listed that should not be public — staging copies, thank-you pages, internal PDFs — needs noindex, not a robots.txt rule.
Two minutes
Where does your
own site land?
Everything above came from opening real websites. Yours takes ten seconds: we load it the way a customer would and say what we find, including when the honest answer is that nothing needs doing.
Worth a
conversation?
No pitch deck and no discovery call. Tell us the trade and the city, and we will say what we would do and what it costs.