How to tell Google not to index my page?

Sometimes we have cases when we do not want a page to be indexed on Google.

For example:

If we've created a new page and are still working on it, and we do not want to index it on Google yet.

Or a specific page that we do not want Google to go to and add to search results, such as a 'shopping cart' page in a store, for example.

There are two requests that can be added to the code on our page itself:

1. No index

2. No follow

The tag looks like this:

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

What is the purpose of each of them?

"No index" - tells Google not to index the current page

"No follow" - tell Google to not track the links on the site (when Google bot crawls our site/page, it also goes through its internal links, by that it also considers their specific value and also follows them and "understand" our site structure)

You can add the codes manually, or add them using a WordPress plugin called Yoast.

In the video, you can see how I tell Google not to index the page and not to follow the links on that page.

Those settings appear towards the end of edit page/post on your site.

Note:

In principle, even if there's a page that we do not want Google to index, we can still add the "nofollow" tag and let Google follow the links.

Why? It's a good idea Because Google will continue to value these internal links and will continue to crawl the links from that page and build the structure of the whole site.

Any questions?

I will be happy to help