Google supports a variety of ways that allows site owners control what shows up in Google’s
search results. While most people focus on getting their pages indexed, sometimes it’s
important to do the opposite: prevent content from appearing in Search. There are a few
reasons you might want to hide content from Google:
- To restrict data: You might have data hosted on your site that you want to show
only to users who are already on your site. You can block Google from crawling such data so
it doesn’t show up in search results.
Also keep in mind that certain files published on your site may have metadata that can show
up in Search.
Learn more about keeping redacted information out of Search. - To hide content of less value to your audience: Your website might have low quality
content that shouldn’t show up in Search. For example, if your website allows users to
create content, some of that content might be
low quality or even spam.
Allowing indexing of such content may have a negative effect on your site’s ranking in
Google’s search results. - To have Google focus on your important content: If you have a very large site (over
hundreds of thousands of URLs) and pages with less important content, or if you have a lot
of duplicate content, you might want to prevent Google from crawling the duplicate or less
important pages in order to focus on your more important content.
How to block content
Here are the main ways to block content from appearing in Google:
| Methods | |
|---|---|
Remove the content from your site | Applicable: all content types Removing content from your site is the best way to ensure that it won’t appear in |
Password-protect your files | Applicable: all content types If you have confidential or private content on your site, you need to password protect |
noindex rule | Applicable: all content types The |
Disallow crawling with | Applicable: images and video Google only indexes images and videos that Googlebot is allowed to crawl. To prevent |
| Opt out of specific Google properties | Applicable: web pages You can tell Google not to include content from your site in specific Google properties, |
Remove existing content from Google
If the content hosted on your site is already appearing in Google, you can request the
removal of those search results. Learn how to
remove a page hosted on your site from Google.
So setzen wir das um
Deciding what to share with Google is a business question before a technical one. We map which sections should be indexed, which should be crawlable but not indexed, and which should not be reachable at all.
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