Now you can have more control over search engines than ever with the latest updates of Google. The latest updates have revealed that Google will discontinue supporting Robots.txt Noindex pages from the 1st of September 2019. As Google belive that noindex robots.txt directive is not an official directive, therefore, to maintain healthy ecosystems and preparing for potential future open source releases, all the codes that handle unsupported and unpublished rules will be removed from the 1st September.
The recent update of Google is the big announcement for the SEO experts that do all the hard work to rank their pages in search engine. If you are still mentioning crawl-delay, nofollow, and noindex in your robots.txt files, then you have enough time to make the necessary changes as Google will stop honoring it after September 1, 2019. Google may send out notifications via Google Search Console if you are still using these unsupported commands in your robots.txt files.
Their conclusion at the time was:
“Ultimately, the NoIndex directive in Robots.txt is pretty effective. It worked in 11 out of 12 cases we tested. It might work for your site, and because of how it’s implemented it gives you a path to prevent crawling of a page AND also have it removed from the index.
That’s pretty useful in concept. However, our tests didn’t show 100 percent success, so it does not always work.”
Read more: A note on unsupported rules in robots.txt
Understanding Nofollow, Noindex, and Disallow
Before you dig deep, it is important to understand the actual meaning of using noindex, disallow or nofollow in robots.txt files. They are worth word knowing as understanding these words means you can better know which part of your site search engines will crawl.
Nofollow: It will explain not to follow the links on your page.
Disallow: Explains the search engine that not to crawl your page.
Noindex: Indicates what pages you don’t want to include in the search results.
What Alternatives You Can Use For Noindex in Robots.txt Files?
If your website still relies on the robots.txt noindex directive then you need to look for the various alternatives to manage your web pages. But what should you use instead?
Noindex in Robots Meta Tags: The noindex tags are used both in HTTP response headers and in HTM, therefore, noindex directive is the most effective way to remove URLs from the index when crawling is allowed. This is one of the most simple and effective alternatives that you can use to have better control over your pages.
Use 404 & 410 HTTP Status Codes: Implementing both status codes means that the page does not exist, that means that will automatically drop URLs from Google’s index once they’re crawled and processed in search engine.
Password Protection: Hiding a page behind a login will ultimately remove it from Google’s index as it required markup to indicate subscription or paywalled content.
Disallow in Robots.txt: Search engines only crawl and indexed the pages that they know well, so if you are disallowing the content from being crawled means it won’t be indexed in Search Engines.
Search Console Remove URL Tool: This is one of the quickest and easiest methods to remove a URL temporarily from Google’s search results.
Also read: Google De-Indexed Your Website? 6 Reasons and Recovery Solutions For You
For further latest Google updates, you can stay tuned to Sixwebsoft technologies and implement the new rules to enhance the performance of your web pages.
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