Have you ever required to stop Google from indexing a specific URL on your website site and displaying it in their research motor outcomes internet pages (SERPs)? If you take care of web web pages very long sufficient, a day will very likely appear when you need to have to know how to do this.

The 3 procedures most usually employed to prevent the indexing of a URL by Google are as follows:

Employing the rel=”nofollow” attribute on all anchor aspects applied to url to the web site to avoid the backlinks from remaining adopted by the crawler.
Making use of a disallow directive in the site’s robots.txt file to reduce the page from staying crawled and indexed.
Employing google reverse index with the information=”noindex” attribute to avert the site from becoming indexed.
When the variations in the a few ways appear to be refined at 1st look, the effectiveness can vary considerably depending on which process you pick.

Applying rel=”nofollow” to protect against Google indexing

Numerous inexperienced website owners endeavor to reduce Google from indexing a distinct URL by working with the rel=”nofollow” attribute on HTML anchor features. They insert the attribute to every single anchor factor on their internet site used to connection to that URL.

Which include a rel=”nofollow” attribute on a connection prevents Google’s crawler from pursuing the website link which, in switch, prevents them from identifying, crawling, and indexing the focus on website page. Though this process might perform as a quick-time period answer, it is not a feasible very long-time period solution.

The flaw with this strategy is that it assumes all inbound backlinks to the URL will contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute. The webmaster, even so, has no way to avoid other net web-sites from linking to the URL with a adopted hyperlink. So the prospects that the URL will eventually get crawled and indexed applying this method is fairly large.

Employing robots.txt to reduce Google indexing

A further prevalent technique applied to avoid 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 avert the page from currently being crawled and indexed. In some circumstances, nevertheless, the URL can nevertheless show up in the SERPs.

Sometimes Google will display a URL in their SERPs nevertheless they have hardly ever indexed the contents of that web site. If adequate web web pages connection to the URL then Google can normally infer the subject of the site from the backlink textual content of those inbound backlinks. As a result they will clearly show the URL in the SERPs for connected queries. While making use of a disallow directive in the robots.txt file will reduce Google from crawling and indexing a URL, it does not promise that the URL will never seem in the SERPs.

Applying the meta robots tag to reduce Google indexing

If you will need to avert Google from indexing a URL whilst also preventing that URL from staying shown in the SERPs then the most effective method is to use a meta robots tag with a written content=”noindex” attribute inside the head element of the website site. Of class, for Google to in fact see this meta robots tag they need to have to initially be able to find out and crawl the site, so do not block the URL with robots.txt. When Google crawls the webpage and discovers the meta robots noindex tag, they will flag the URL so that it will under no circumstances be proven in the SERPs. This is the most helpful way to protect against Google from indexing a URL and exhibiting it in their lookup outcomes.