Why you should tell Google to not index a page
All great marketers understand the more high quality landing pages, with high quality keywords they have on their website can only improve organic search results. But there are times a high quality landing page can hurt you, more than help you. Some of these examples would be a thank-you and newsletter subscription pages. It would also be a good idea to not index duplicate content pages you have created for your Bing or Adwords advertising to
improve your landing page experience.
After all, with all the hard work you put on your website you don’t want anyone finding your thank you or confirmation page on search engines. Not only will this look extremely unprofessional, but you’ll also lose leads/purchases and you’ll start compiling false conversions.
Below you will find two options on how to tell Google to not index a page. Option 2 is much easier.
Robot.txt file
This first option is to create a robot.txt file, which gives you 100% full control on what you want un-indexed and indexed from one single file. Meaning you’ll have the ability to un-index images, single pages, important files, directories, or a group of pages. However, there is also a bit of coding involved, but below you’ll find four articles from Google that makes creating a robot.txt file a breeze.
1)
Learn about robot.txt files2)
Create a robot.txt file3)
Test your robot.txt file
4)
Submit your robot.txt file“no index, no follow” meta tag
This is by far the easiest way to tell Google to not index a page. It just takes one piece of simple code that you’ll copy and paste on each page you want to un-index – that’s it.
To prevent most search engine web crawlers from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the <head> section of your page:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow”>
To prevent only Google web crawlers from indexing a page:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow”>
When does the un-index changes take effect?
Your changes will not take effect until the next crawl by each individual search engine, this can take a few weeks. To speed up the process you can request a crawl from Google by logging into your
Google Webmaster Tools account.
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