Remove content from Google's index

Block Google or any other search engine from indexing your content with a single line of code.

This video features an old UI. Updated version coming soon!

There are a thousand reasons why you might not want search engines indexing particular content on a published project. Maybe you need to publish assets or sensitive information but don't want Google — or any other search engine — listing that page in search results.

In this lesson

We're going to show you one of the most common ways to block Google from indexing your content — using this snippet of code: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Remove a page from the index
Remove a site from the index

Before you begin

You can remove the webflow.io subdomain from the index by disabling indexing in your Project settings.
If you’re comfortable with writing robots.txt files, you can also disable indexing of pages, folders of pages, or the entire site by populating the project’s robots.txt file.

Remove a page from the index

To remove a specific page, add the code snippet in the <head> code of that page</head>.

Go to Page panel → Page settings → Custom code
Paste the code: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Save and publish

Remove a site from the index

To remove the entire project from the index, add the same code in the <head> code of the project</head>.

Go to Project settings → Custom code → Head code
Paste the code: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Save the changes
Publish the site

Good to know

You won't need to add the noindex code for pages that are saved as draft since they aren't published at all. So, if you have any pages that are still under construction, or that you do not need to publish (like your project’s style guide for example), it's best to save them as draft.

Troubleshooting

Search engines must be able to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tags. If they cannot crawl your page, they won’t be able to read that code, meaning your page will still be indexed and might still appear in search results.

If your page is still appearing in search results after you’ve added the noindex code, check the following:

Go to your page settings and check that the code snippet is saved in the head section of your custom code
Publish the site again
Request Google to recrawl your page using the Fetch as Google tool
Check your robots.txt file if it's blocking your page or site. You can test your robots.txt using the robots.txt Tester tool.
If the page is blocked from webcrawlers, unblock it by removing it from your robots.txt file
Publish your site again
Again, request Google to recrawl your page