What is the difference between noindex and robots.txt?

Robots.txt tells crawlers which addresses not to fetch; noindex tells them not to show a page they have fetched. To keep a page out of results, use noindex and let crawlers fetch it.

Does noindex hide a page from people?

No. The page stays live for anybody with its address, and links to it keep working. It only keeps the page out of search results.

Glossary · SEO

Noindex

Noindex is a rule that asks search engines not to show a page in their results. You set it with a robots meta tag in the page’s head, or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. The page stays live for anybody who has the link.

DashboardOpen dashboard Start freeNo card. Your blog is live in a minute.

An example

In the head of the page · html

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

noindex keeps the page out of results; follow lets search engines still follow its links to your other pages. For a file that has no head, such as a PDF, the server sends the same rule as a header:

HTTP response header · plain

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Why it matters for a small-business blog

Some posts should be readable but not found: a notice only for existing customers, a page you send in an email campaign, an old offer you keep live for people who have the link, a test post. Noindex keeps them out of results without taking them down.

It also works the other way round. A forgotten noindex on a page you want found is one of the quietest ways to lose it from search: the page looks fine, and nothing tells you.

Common mistakes

Blocking the page in robots.txt as well. Google has to read the page to see the noindex. If robots.txt blocks it, the rule is never seen, and the page can stay in results.
Adding or removing it with JavaScript. Google may skip running scripts when it sees noindex in the HTML, so a script that removes it may never run. If you want a page indexed, keep noindex out of its HTML.
Using it to choose between duplicates. Google recommends a canonical link for that; noindex removes the page from search altogether.
Expecting it to work at once. The page leaves results after it is crawled again, which can take months for a page Google rarely visits. URL Inspection in Search Console can ask for a recrawl.
Treating it as privacy. Anybody with the address can still read the page. Use a password for anything private.

How CMSKite handles it

One switch per post: “Keep out of search”, off unless you turn it on.
On the free blog link, a post with it on gets <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> and is left out of the sitemap.
With the embed, the post is left out of the sitemap of your posts, but the script does not add a noindex tag to your page. That is a limit, and our SEO page says so.
Through the API, the post has seo.noIndex: true, GET /v1/blog/sitemap leaves it out, and your page adds the robots tag. The code is in Making your posts findable.

Sources

Checked on 4 October 2026.

Questions

What is the difference between noindex and robots.txt?: Robots.txt tells crawlers which addresses not to fetch; noindex tells them not to show a page they have fetched. To keep a page out of results, use noindex and let crawlers fetch it.
Does noindex hide a page from people?: No. The page stays live for anybody with its address, and links to it keep working. It only keeps the page out of search results.

Checked 4 October 2026