Editing Noindex (section)

{{short description|Meta tag used to request that Internet bots avoid indexing a web page}}
{{lowercase}}
{{for|the internal use on Wikipedia|WP:NOINDEX|selfref=y}}
The '''noindex''' value of an HTML robots [[meta tag]] requests that automated [[Internet bots]] avoid [[Search engine indexing|indexing]] a web page.<ref name="W3spec">[http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4.1.2 Robots and the META element], Official W3 specification</ref><ref>[http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html About the Robots <META> tag]</ref> It is also a value of the HTTP response header X-Robots-Tag.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/71351/robots-txt-vs-noindex-tags|title=Robots.txt vs. Noindex Tags}}</ref> Reasons why one might want to use this meta tag include advising robots not to index a very large database, web pages that are very transitory, web pages that are under development, web pages that one wishes to keep slightly more private, or the printer and mobile-friendly versions of pages. Since the burden of honoring a website's noindex tag lies with the author of the search robot, sometimes these tags are ignored. Also the interpretation of the noindex tag is sometimes slightly different from one search engine company to the next.