Have you ever needed to stop Google from indexing a individual URL on your website internet site and exhibiting it in their look for engine effects webpages (SERPs)? If you control world-wide-web web pages long plenty of, a working day will likely appear when you need to know how to do this.

The a few strategies most generally utilised to avert the indexing of a URL by Google are as follows:

Applying the rel=”nofollow” attribute on all anchor things utilized to url to the webpage to protect against the inbound links from becoming adopted by the crawler.
Using a disallow directive in the site’s robots.txt file to stop the website page from getting crawled and indexed.
Making use of the meta robots tag with the written content=”noindex” attribute to avoid the website page from currently being indexed.
Though the discrepancies in the three methods show up to be delicate at 1st glance, the effectiveness can range significantly relying on which system you choose.

Using rel=”nofollow” to stop Google indexing

Quite a few inexperienced webmasters attempt to avoid Google from indexing a certain URL by utilizing the rel=”nofollow” attribute on HTML anchor things. They insert the attribute to just about every anchor aspect on their web site utilized to hyperlink to that URL.

Such as a rel=”nofollow” attribute on a link stops Google’s crawler from following the link which, in switch, prevents them from finding, crawling, and indexing the concentrate on page. When this technique may well work as a small-expression option, it is not a practical long-expression resolution.

The flaw with this approach is that it assumes all inbound links to the URL will involve a rel=”nofollow” attribute. The webmaster, having said that, has no way to stop other world wide web web pages from linking to the URL with a adopted url. So the probabilities that the URL will at some point get crawled and indexed making use of this process is fairly significant.

Making use of robots.txt to stop Google indexing

A further typical approach applied to reduce the indexing of a URL by Google is to use the robots.txt file. check google ranking of website can be included to the robots.txt file for the URL in problem. Google’s crawler will honor the directive which will protect against the web page from getting crawled and indexed. In some situations, on the other hand, the URL can nevertheless surface in the SERPs.

Often Google will screen a URL in their SERPs even though they have by no means indexed the contents of that website page. If adequate website internet sites connection to the URL then Google can often infer the subject of the site from the hyperlink textual content of all those inbound backlinks. As a consequence they will demonstrate the URL in the SERPs for similar queries. Even though employing a disallow directive in the robots.txt file will prevent Google from crawling and indexing a URL, it does not promise that the URL will by no means look in the SERPs.

Applying the meta robots tag to reduce Google indexing

If you need to have to stop Google from indexing a URL while also preventing that URL from getting exhibited in the SERPs then the most helpful tactic is to use a meta robots tag with a content material=”noindex” attribute in the head ingredient of the world-wide-web page. Of program, for Google to essentially see this meta robots tag they have to have to initial be ready to find and crawl the website page, so do not block the URL with robots.txt. When Google crawls the site and discovers the meta robots noindex tag, they will flag the URL so that it will under no circumstances be shown in the SERPs. This is the most powerful way to reduce Google from indexing a URL and exhibiting it in their research effects.