Noindex

Noindex is an instruction in a page's code telling search engines to leave that page out of their results.

The page still works normally and anyone with the link can visit it.

It's the right setting for thank-you pages, ads landing pages, internal tools and staging sites.

Thank-you pages especially, so the only people who reach one are those who filled in the form, which keeps the conversion count accurate.

I check for a stray site-wide noindex as part of every launch.

Noindex asks for a page to be left out of results, while robots.txt asks for it not to be read at all.

Blocking a page in robots.txt can actually prevent the noindex being seen, so the 2 shouldn't be combined on the same page.

What this means for you

When a site drops out of Google overnight, a stray noindex is 1 of the first things I check, and it's a quick fix once found.

This one sits under Web design.

I'll look at what you've got and tell you where it stands, in the same plain terms.