A customer mentions they found your “Thank you for your enquiry” page in Google. Or you notice a staff-only price sheet, published months ago so the team could see it on their phones, sitting in search results under your business name. The page needs to stay on the site. It just should not be found by searching.
That is what noindex is for. What follows is how to noindex a page in WordPress with Yoast SEO or Rank Math, which pages are good candidates, how it differs from robots.txt and password protection, and how to check it has worked. It is one of the tasks in our WordPress help guide that takes a minute to do and is easy to get wrong.
What noindex actually does
A noindex setting adds a small instruction to the page’s code, a robots meta tag, asking search engines not to include the page in their results. The page itself is unchanged. Anyone with the link can still open it, and visitors can still reach it from your menus.
Two details matter:
- Google has to visit the page to see the instruction. If the page is already in results, it drops out only after Google crawls it again, which can take a while.
- It is per page. Ticking “Discourage search engines” under Settings → Reading does something similar for the entire site, which is almost never what a live business wants. Our post on the Discourage search engines setting covers that switch.
Pages worth keeping out of search
- Form thank-you pages. Nobody searching should land on a confirmation for a form they never filled in. See setting up a form thank-you page for the rest of that page’s setup.
- Test and practice pages that were published rather than left as drafts.
- Pages for staff or existing clients, such as an internal price list or an onboarding page, where you want easy access but not public discovery. If the content is sensitive, noindex is not enough; see the comparison below.
- Landing pages built only for an ad campaign, especially if they repeat a service page almost word for word.
- Near-empty pages that exist for a technical reason, such as a page a plugin created that has no real content.
What not to noindex: anything you would like a customer to find. Service pages, contact, about, location pages and useful blog posts should stay indexable. Most accidental damage comes from a single wrong tick on an important page, or from a site-wide rule applied to a content type without checking what that type includes.
How to noindex a page in WordPress
Core WordPress has no per-page noindex switch, so you need an SEO plugin. Both common plugins put the option in the editor.
With Yoast SEO
- Open the page in the editor and open the Yoast panel, from the toolbar icon or the box below the content.
- Expand the Advanced section.
- Find the question asking whether search engines may show this page in search results, and choose No.
- Save with the Update button.
With Rank Math
- With the page open for editing, select Rank Math’s score button in the top bar.
- Go to the Advanced tab.
- Under Robots Meta, select No Index. Depending on the version, you may first need to switch on custom robots settings for this page so it does not simply follow the site-wide default.
- Update the page.
Both plugins usually remove noindexed pages from the sitemap automatically, which is what you want: a sitemap should list only pages you hope to see in search. You may also see a nofollow option nearby. That is a different instruction, about whether to follow the links on the page, and you can leave it alone.
Noindex, robots.txt or a password: which one?
These three get confused often, and choosing the wrong one can produce the opposite of what you meant.
| Method | What it does | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Noindex | Page can be visited, but search engines are asked not to list it. | Thank-you pages, test pages, low-value pages you still need. |
| robots.txt block | Asks search engines not to crawl the address at all. | Not for hiding pages. A blocked page can still appear in results if other sites link to it, and Google cannot read a noindex tag on a page it is told not to crawl. |
| Password protected | WordPress shows a password form instead of the content. Set it in the page’s visibility setting. | Content visitors should not read without a password you share. |
| Private | Only logged-in users with the right role can see it; everyone else gets a “not found” page. | Content only for people with an account on your site. |
The mistake to avoid is combining noindex with a robots.txt block on the same address. The block stops Google from seeing the noindex, so the page can linger in results. If you are working on robots.txt for other reasons, our post on editing robots.txt in WordPress explains what belongs in it.
Check that it worked
- Open the page in a private window, view the source and search for “noindex”. You should find a robots meta tag containing it. If you do not, clear any page cache and look again.
- In Google Search Console, paste the page address into the URL Inspection bar. After Google has recrawled it, the result should say the page is not indexed and give the reason as excluded by a noindex tag.
- To prompt a recrawl, use Request indexing in URL Inspection. It sounds backwards, but it asks Google to fetch the page again, and that is when it notices the new instruction.
When you need it gone from results quickly
If the page contains something that must not be shown, such as a personal phone number, noindex alone may feel too slow. Search Console has a Removals tool that hides an address from Google’s results temporarily, while the noindex takes effect. It is a temporary measure, so keep the noindex in place; and if the content should not be online at all, remove or password-protect it. Search Console’s own help pages on the Removals tool describe how long a removal lasts and what it covers.
Undoing a noindex
Change the setting back to allow search engines, update the page, and request indexing in URL Inspection. The page should return once Google recrawls it, though nothing ensures it will appear in the same place it had before. Noindex sits with titles, redirects and sitemaps among the everyday controls set out in our WordPress SEO starter guide.
Frequently asked questions
Can I noindex a whole section, such as all my landing pages?
If the pages share a content type or category, SEO plugins let you set a default for that type in their site-wide settings. Check carefully what the type contains first. If the landing pages are ordinary pages mixed with your service pages, set noindex on each one individually instead.
Will a noindexed page still pass value through its links?
The page can still be crawled, and Google can still follow its links, at least for a while. Over a long time Google may crawl a noindexed page less often. For a thank-you or test page this does not matter, because those pages rarely hold links you depend on.
Should I noindex old blog posts that get no visits?
Not as a habit. A post with no visits is better improved, merged into a stronger post with a redirect, or deleted if it is out of date. Noindex suits pages that must exist for visitors but have no value to searchers, not posts that simply have not been found yet.
Does noindex hide a page from my own site search?
No. WordPress’s built-in search looks at your published content directly and ignores the robots meta tag, so a noindexed page can still appear when visitors search your site. If that matters, use a site search plugin that lets you exclude pages, or make the page private.
On a site with years of pages, finding every noindex means checking the plugin’s site-wide rules as well as each page’s own setting. Our WordPress support can go through both with you and explain what each one is doing before anything is changed.
Next in this series: Internal Linking in WordPress: Link Your Pages Well
