Solutions Applied to Avoid Google Indexing

Have you ever required to avoid Google from indexing a unique URL on your world wide web web site and exhibiting it in their search motor outcomes webpages (SERPs)? If you deal with internet web pages lengthy plenty of, a day will very likely arrive when you will need to know how to do this.

The a few solutions most typically applied to prevent the indexing of a URL by Google are as follows:

Applying the rel=”nofollow” attribute on all anchor factors utilized to url to the site to avoid the hyperlinks from currently being adopted by the crawler.
Utilizing a disallow directive in the site’s robots.txt file to stop the web page from being crawled and indexed.
Applying the meta robots tag with the content=”noindex” attribute to protect against the web page from getting indexed.
Although the dissimilarities in the a few techniques surface to be refined at initially look, the efficiency can differ greatly based on which method you pick.

Making use of rel=”nofollow” to prevent Google indexing

Several inexperienced website owners attempt to reduce Google from indexing a certain URL by employing the rel=”nofollow” attribute on HTML anchor things. They insert the attribute to each and every anchor element on their website made use of to website link to that URL.

Including google reverse index =”nofollow” attribute on a link stops Google’s crawler from subsequent the connection which, in flip, stops them from exploring, crawling, and indexing the concentrate on website page. While this process may well perform as a brief-term resolution, it is not a viable very long-time period option.

The flaw with this strategy is that it assumes all inbound back links to the URL will incorporate a rel=”nofollow” attribute. The webmaster, nonetheless, has no way to reduce other world wide web web-sites from linking to the URL with a adopted backlink. So the chances that the URL will ultimately get crawled and indexed employing this approach is rather substantial.

Working with robots.txt to protect against Google indexing

One more common system utilized to reduce the indexing of a URL by Google is to use the robots.txt file. A disallow directive can be additional to the robots.txt file for the URL in dilemma. Google’s crawler will honor the directive which will stop the web site from currently being crawled and indexed. In some situations, however, the URL can continue to show up in the SERPs.

At times Google will show a URL in their SERPs though they have under no circumstances indexed the contents of that website page. If more than enough web web sites website link to the URL then Google can usually infer the topic of the page from the website link textual content of individuals inbound one-way links. As a final result they will demonstrate the URL in the SERPs for relevant queries. Even though employing a disallow directive in the robots.txt file will protect against Google from crawling and indexing a URL, it does not promise that the URL will in no way show up in the SERPs.

Applying the meta robots tag to stop Google indexing

If you require to protect against Google from indexing a URL though also preventing that URL from currently being displayed in the SERPs then the most productive method is to use a meta robots tag with a content=”noindex” attribute within the head element of the internet page. Of training course, for Google to actually see this meta robots tag they have to have to very first be capable to find and crawl the webpage, so do not block the URL with robots.txt. When Google crawls the web site and discovers the meta robots noindex tag, they will flag the URL so that it will never be proven in the SERPs. This is the most successful way to reduce Google from indexing a URL and displaying it in their look for final results.