How to Noindex Pages
Occasionally, when running marketing campaigns or creating new pages on your website, you do not want this page to end up appearing in the SERP (Search engine results page). To inform Google you do not want to have a page appear in the results, you need to ‘noindex’ it, which will instruct the Google crawlbot not to register it as a page eligible to appear in the SERP.
The main reasons you may want to noindex your pages are:
- Duplicate content: Probably the most likely scenario for a cycling retailer to encounter and something that can be quite easily done when creating new pages. If a page (be it a product group, landing page or automatically generated push landing page) has the same content as another page on your website or another website, e.g. the exact same products in a product group landing page to your brand product page, search engines may penalise your site for duplicate content, or atleast become confused with which page you are intending it to crawl and take the information from. It also creates more pages to manage and optimise, meaning more work for little to no gain.
- Thin content: If a page has very little content or is of low quality, it may not be worth including in search engine results. In this case, you can use the "noindex" tag to prevent the page from being indexed.
- Private content: If you have pages on your website that contain sensitive information or are intended for a specific audience, you may want to prevent these pages from appearing in search engine results. In this case, you can use the "noindex" tag to keep these pages private.
- Testing: If you are testing a new page or feature on your website and don't want it to appear in search engine results yet, you can use the "noindex" tag to prevent it from being indexed until you're ready to launch it. A great example of this could be a campaign landing page for a mailer you are putting out about a new bike launch, but it is currently under embargo. You will be able to test out the design of the page and set up your marketing campaigns prior to launch without the worry of somebody stumbling across this new page through their search engines.
Now we have some context around why we may need to utilise the noindex option, how do you actually apply it to your push. Website? We have built in a simple tickbox, within the product group builder to allow you to apply this to your page and noindex your page. If you navigate to your Web Editor > Products > Product Groups and then find the product group you would like to noindex. Once in the product group, go to the ‘Category / Landing Page’ tab, and then select ‘No Index’ and save. Your page will now not be crawlable by Google, meaning it should not appear within the SERP.
*Please note, at the moment, the push ‘noindex’ option is only available for product group pages currently.
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