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Indexability

What is Indexability ?

It refers to the page's possibility of being displayed at the SERPs.  A non-indexable page means that it will not be present on search engine results and will end by not bringing traffic to it.  You can prevent search engines from indexing a page by using the "noindex" or "none" instruction. 

Why is it important ?

By using the meta tag "noindex" or "none" in the HTML code or with a header "X-Robots-tag: noindex" you can decide which page should be visited by search engines.

How to manager your page indexability

If you want to prevent search engines from indexing a page, you can add the "noindex" or "none" instruction as a meta tag or HTTP response header. Both have the same effect and you can choose depending on the degree of control you have over your server and your specific publishing process.

Example  - <meta> tag

Add the following meta tag in the <head> section of your page :

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Example   <meta>  tag for Google

Add the following meta tag in the <head> section of your page if you only want to block Google crawlers:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

Example  - HTTP Response Header

You can choose to display an X-Robots-Tag header with a noindex or none value in your response :

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
(…)
X-Robots-Tag: noindex
(…)

If the page is not being indexed when it was supposed to be, you should :

  • verify if  there isn't a "noindex" or  "none" instruction  in the directives to the crawlers

Ps: It may be that the request for non-indexation is voluntary or that it is an error, hence the presence of this analysis.