Question 1

What happens if I have conflicting meta robots tags on the same page?

Accepted Answer

If a page contains multiple meta robots tags with conflicting directives (for example, one tag says index and another tag further down the page says noindex), search engines are programmed to default to the most restrictive directive. In this scenario, Googlebot will honor the noindex command and ignore the index command. This restrictive-first logic prevents sensitive information from accidentally leaking into search results due to coding errors or conflicting CMS plugins.

Question 2

Does noindex prevent a page from being crawled?

Accepted Answer

No, a noindex tag does not prevent crawling. In order for a search engine to see the noindex tag, it must first request, download, and parse the HTML of the page. Therefore, the page will still consume a small portion of your crawl budget. If you want to completely stop a bot from requesting the page and saving server bandwidth, you must use a Disallow directive in your robots.txt file instead.

Question 3

How long does it take for a noindex tag to work?

Accepted Answer

The tag only takes effect upon the next crawl. If you add a noindex tag to a highly authoritative news homepage, Googlebot might recrawl it within 15 minutes and drop it from the index immediately. However, if you add the tag to a deeply buried, obscure page that hasn't been crawled in months, it could take several weeks for Google to revisit the page, see the tag, and remove the URL from the search engine results pages. You can expedite this by using Google Search Console to manually request indexing for that specific URL.

Question 4

Should I use nofollow on all my external links?

Accepted Answer

No, applying a blanket nofollow meta tag to all external links is an outdated SEO practice from the early 2010s known as "PageRank Sculpting." Google's algorithms have evolved significantly, and linking out to high-quality, authoritative sources is now considered a positive signal of your own content's credibility. You should only use nofollow (or the more specific rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc") for paid advertisements, affiliate links, or user-generated content that you cannot actively moderate.

Question 5

Can I use a meta robots tag to block only specific search engines?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the name attribute in the meta tag targets specific user agents. While targets all bots, you can target Google specifically by using . You could theoretically tell Googlebot to noindex the page while allowing Bingbot to index it by using two separate tags. This is useful if a specific crawler is causing issues on your site, but generally, webmasters apply directives globally using the generic "robots" name.

Question 6

Will a noindex page eventually lose all its SEO value?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Historically, Google stated that a noindex, follow page would pass link equity through its links indefinitely. However, Google's John Mueller clarified that over time, if a page remains marked as noindex for a long period (typically several months), Google will eventually stop crawling it entirely. Once they stop crawling it, they will treat it as a noindex, nofollow page, and the page will cease to pass any PageRank to the URLs it links to.

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