Some posts and pages should not show up in search results. To make sure they don’t show up, you should tell search engines to exclude them. You do this with a meta robots noindex tag. For example; you might not want people to find the “thank you”-page you redirect people to when they’ve contacted you. Or your checkout success page. Setting a page to noindex makes sure search engines never show it in their results.
How to set a page to noindex in Yoast SEO
Setting a post or page to noindex is simple when you are running Yoast SEO. Underneath your post, in the Yoast SEO meta box, click on the advaneced tab:
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On the advanced tab, you’ll find the meta robots dropdown. It’ll default to the default robots meta setting for that post type. Set it to noindex to make sure this page does not show up in the search results:
Please note that if the post you’re setting to noindex is already in the search results, it might take some time for the page to disappear. The search engines will first have to re-index the page to find the noindex tag. Do not noindex posts frivolously: if they were getting traffic before, you’re losing that traffic!
Do links on noindexed pages have value?
When you set a post to noindex, Yoast SEO automatically assumes you want to set it to noindex, follow. This means that search engines will still follow the links on those pages. If you do not want the search engines to follow the links, set the radio button to nofollow:
Setting the meta robots to nofollow will change the search engines behavior so they will ignore all the links on the page. Use this with caution!
If you want to learn more about meta robots tags, read our ultimate guide to meta robots. Or read more about WordPress SEO, and get the most out of your site!