Methods Used to Prevent Google Indexing
Have you ever needed to prevent Google from indexing a particular URL on your web site and displaying it in their search engine results pages (SERPs)? If you manage web sites long enough, a day will likely come when you need to know how to do this. The three methods most commonly used to prevent the indexing of a URL by Google are as follows: Using the rel="nofollow" attribute on all anchor elements used to link to the page to prevent the links from being followed by the crawler. Using a disallow directive in the site's robots.txt file to prevent the page from being crawled and indexed. Using the meta robots tag with the content="noindex" attribute to prevent the page from being indexed. While the differences in the three approaches appear to be subtle at first glance, the effectiveness can vary drastically depending on which method you choose. Using rel="nofollow" to prevent Google indexing Many inexperienced webmasters attempt to prevent Google from