Noindex and Nofollow Explained
Noindex and nofollow sound like a pair and do unrelated jobs. The Robots Meta Tag Generator produces the tag they live in, and knowing which you want saves a lot of trouble.
Noindex keeps a page out of search
A noindex instruction says: do not list this page in search results. It is the correct and only reliable way to keep a page out of Google.
It goes in the page's own meta robots tag, or in an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header for files like PDFs that have no head section.
The crawler must be allowed to fetch the page to see it. This is the trap: blocking a URL in robots.txt means the noindex is never read, so the page can remain indexed indefinitely. If you want a page gone, let it be crawled and let it say noindex. The Robots.txt Generator article covers that distinction in more detail.
Typical uses: thank-you and confirmation pages, internal search results, thin tag archives, staging copies, and printable duplicates.
Nofollow is about links
Nofollow originally told search engines not to pass ranking credit through a link. It was introduced in 2005 to fight comment spam.
Since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a directive - it may still use the link for discovery and may still pass some signal. Two more specific values arrived at the same time: rel="sponsored" for paid and affiliate links, and rel="ugc" for user-generated content like comments. Those are the ones to use now where they apply, and marking paid links is not optional - undisclosed paid links are a link-scheme violation.
As a page-level instruction, nofollow in the meta robots tag means do not follow any link on this page. That is rarely what anyone wants and it is worth checking you did not set it accidentally.
The combination that cancels itself
noindex, nofollow together is a common reflex and usually a mistake.
Noindex removes the page from search. Nofollow stops credit flowing through its links - including to pages you do want indexed. On a page that links onward into your site, that leaks value for no benefit.
noindex, follow is almost always what you want: keep the page out of results, let the links keep working. Google has said it eventually treats long-term noindex pages as nofollow regardless, since it stops crawling them - but for pages that are reachable and linked, the distinction still matters.
Common questions
How long until a noindexed page disappears?
Once recrawled, usually days to weeks. The URL removal tool in Search Console is faster for something urgent.
Does noindex remove it from other engines?
Bing and most others respect it too.
Should I nofollow outbound links?
No. Normal editorial links to good sources are fine and always have been. Mark paid and user-submitted ones.
What about a noindexed page with a canonical?
Conflicting signals - one says consolidate here, the other says do not list this. Pick one; the Canonical Tag Generator article covers which.
Need the right tag for a page?