hello and I need this answer, how to mark the 404 pages with noindex
this is my 404 page https://antena24.ro/ggg I would like Google not to index these pages. How do I proceed? to implement in this page a meta with noindex?
Hi @marketertricks,
Thanks for reaching out!
The truth is, it doesn’t matter whether a 404 page contains a noindex or index robots meta directive.
This is because search engines like Google will never index 404 pages, and if a page is already indexed and suddenly shows 404, Google will de-index that page automatically, even if the 404 page contains the noindex robots meta directive.
Google clearly stated this information in their guidelines:
“Google’s indexing pipeline doesn’t consider URLs that return a 4xx status code for indexing, and URLs that are already indexed and return a 4xx status code are removed from the index.
Any content Googlebot received from URLs that return a 4xx status code is ignored.
The indexing pipeline removes the URL from the index if it was previously indexed. Newly encountered 404 pages aren’t processed. The crawling frequency gradually decreases.”
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/http-network-errors#http-status-codes
In short, you shouldn’t be worried about having a noindex meta tag in a 404 page, as no 404 pages will be indexed on Google.
Hi antena24,
404 pages are set to noindex automatically.
As mentioned above, Google won’t index your 404 pages anyhow as long as it clearly finds a 404 error on your page.
I’ve checked your site and confirm that you already have a noindex robots meta tag in your 404 pages: https://a.supportally.com/i/U9yde7
I hope that helps! Please let me know if you’ve any other questions!
thanks for the clarification, it’s very helpful. maximum health
Thank you for your detailed answer. It really seems like that. I checked with Google webmaster how it reacts to different pages with 404 and noindex (url checking tool). When there is 404, it does not pay attention to the noindex code.
I replaced the code output of deleted pages 404 with 410, I hope it will help to quickly remove them from the attention of search engines.
