How To Deindex Webpages from Search Results

Typically, we want websites to be easy to discover through search engines like Google. That’s why businesses put so much effort into search engine optimization (SEO) to improve search rank.

But sometimes, you may want a page or an entire site to go into hiding—temporarily or permanently. To do that, you have to deindex those webpages. Think of this like turning on a cloaking device within a search engine. Once you flip the switch on this process, your page won’t show up in results anymore.

Let’s look at some situations where telling search engines “there’s nothing to see here” is a savvy move, and explore best practices for making pages vanish from view.

What does deindex mean?

When you deindex a webpage, Google and other search engines remove it from the results surfaced to users. Site owners often ask Google to deindex certain pages that aren’t useful anymore, like pages for products no longer for sale.

Occasionally, Google will deindex pages unexpectedly on its own initiative. When Google pulls the plug on page visibility, it means fewer shoppers can find your store through Google search. This can correspond to a drop in traffic and sales.

You might run into this problem because the page does something Google’s search algorithm doesn’t like, such as:

• Violating quality guidelines against spam and keyword stuffing

• Containing too much content copied from other websites

• Being polluted with malware

• Blocking Google’s access due to a technical problem

• Having low-quality content that Google’s algorithm believes is spam

How to avoid involuntary deindexing

Google runs quality checks to ensure it’s surfacing only the most helpful, relevant content in its search results. These checks—part of core algorithm updates or manual reviews—are meant to filter out low-quality or manipulative content.

If your website doesn’t meet Google’s standards, you could face a deindexing crisis, where your pages disappear from search results altogether. This can tank your organic traffic and undo months (or years) of SEO work.

Google’s ultimate goal is to provide searchers with trustworthy, useful content. If your site looks spammy, outdated, or thin on substance, it could be flagged—especially during algorithm updates. 

Fortunately, website owners can avoid this by sticking to a few clear content and site-quality guidelines:

• Focus on consistently original content that is truly helpful to customers

• Keep webpages freshly updated

• Maintain healthy technical hygiene (no broken links or duplicate content)

• Avoid black hat SEO tactics that tarnish the site’s reputation

Why deindex a page?

• Duplicate content
• Low-quality content
• Confidential information
• Outdated or irrelevant content

Deindexing isn’t a bad thing, as long as you can control it. It actually can be very helpful to your business. Asking Google to remove a webpage from the search engine index can be necessary for many reasons: pages have become redundant or contain outdated content, or you need to protect sensitive info, for example. Here are common scenarios where choosing to deindex a page would be a smart move.

Duplicate content 

When webpages have too much repetitive content, search engines have trouble deciding which page to rank. This can dilute overall SEO performance.

For example, your store might have duplicate product pages with only slight variations for different regions. By deindexing the redundant pages, Google can rank the main product page you want and ignore the others.

If you would rather not deindex duplicate pages, there’s a workaround: use canonical tags in HTML, which teach the search engine which page is the preferred version to be indexed by Google and ranked. Shopify themes use canonical tags by default for common page types (like products, collections, and blog posts). This way, you don’t have to bother asking Google to deindex the redundant pages. 

Low-quality content

When users see a webpage as worthless, the site’s overall quality score in Google search ultimately will take a hit. A webpage stacked with SEO keywords and minimal, sketchy content, is a likely candidate for involuntary deindexing.

Google regularly updates its guidance about what it considers spam, so stay up to date on its spam policies. If you’ve published content that could be classified as spam, you can request Google deindex the suspect page, fix the page content, then ask Google to reindex it.

Confidential information

Website pages may contain sensitive information—like user account information, administrative login pages, or pages that give customers access to resources after purchase. None of these should be discoverable through search. Deindexing these pages protects data and prevents malactors from storming into private sectors of the website. 

Outdated or irrelevant content

As a website evolves, pages can become outdated or lose relevance. For example, you may run a seasonal promotion with a landing page, but once over, you don’t want the page to appear in Google search results. Deindexing these pages will direct search traffic to more accurate and up-to-date information.

Common pages to deindex

Here’s a hotlist of pages that you should probably deindex.

• User account pages. These are personalized and private, offering no value to search engines or general users. Indexing them can lead to privacy concerns.

• Checkout pages. Users searching online aren’t looking to land directly on your checkout—they want product info first. Indexing these pages doesn’t align with user intent and can clutter your search presence with irrelevant results.

• Out-of-stock items. If a product is no longer available, showing it in search results leads to a dead-end for users. This can frustrate potential buyers and increase your bounce rate, both of which can hurt your SEO.

• Faceted navigation pages. These are filtered versions of category pages (e.g., “red shoes under $50”) that often create thousands of thin, duplicate pages. This kind of duplicate content can confuse search engines and dilute your site’s domain authority.

• Paginated pages. While helpful for users navigating long lists, these pages (e.g., /page/2, /page/3) offer little standalone value. It’s more efficient for search engines to index only the first page, keeping your crawl focused and reducing index bloat.

How to deindex a webpage

• Delete the page
• Remove in Google Search Console
• Noindex meta tag
• X-robots-tag
• Robots.txt file

To manage webpage visibility in search results, you can request for Google to deindex pages so it won’t crawl them anymore and spit them out in search engine results. Here are the most common methods for deindexing.

Delete the page

The most extreme—but foolproof—way to deindex is to delete the webpage entirely. It’s like discarding a book from the library shelves. Eventually, Google will crawl the old webpage address, encounter a “page not found” error, and drop the URL from its list of known pages. Generally, this can take a few days to a few months.

Page removal is a no-nonsense approach, but it’s also unforgiving. Once the page is gone, it’s gone. This isn’t the approach if you plan to eventually reindex it. The best use case for page removal would be when a webpage has become outdated and irrelevant, and you know you’ll never need it again. It’s also not instant—so if you need something removed immediately from the Google index, consider doing it through the Google Search Console.

If you delete a page, make sure to set up a redirect to the most relevant alternate page, in case someone finds their way to it through an old link.

Remove in Google Search Console

Imagine you’ve posted embarrassing or legally compromising info on the website and need it taken down ASAP. Deleting the page is one way, but it’s going to take time for Google to notice. For more instant results, use the Removals tool in Google Search Console.

While it’s true the removal request is temporary—about six months—the Removals tool buys enough time to fix the content. The page won’t appear in search results in the meantime. Over the course of those months, you can decide on a more long-term solution.

Google Search Console has a few removal options:

• Remove the URL directly from search results. You can request removal of the URL from Google’s index, and it won’t show up in any search results. This works fast, effectively hiding the page from search instantly, but it’s temporary. 

• Remove the URL from the cache. You ask Google to delete its stored snapshot of the URL from its system. This is useful when you have updated a page with new information (like pricing) and want Google to reflect the changes right away.

• Do both at the same time. Google will remove its stored snapshot and remove the URL from its search index. This ensures outdated snippets aren’t shown and the page won’t appear in search results for about six months.

Noindex meta tag

Think of the noindex meta tag as a way to tell Google, “This page is still here, but please keep it a secret. Don’t show it in your search results.” Use noindex when you want to keep the page active, but don’t want the general public to find it through search. Maybe the page has functionality on the website for behind-the-scenes purposes (e.g., a thank you page after a purchase). These pages are functional but shouldn’t clutter up the search results.

Noindex is a handy way to hide pages without removing them or deleting them entirely. If you have a lot of duplicate content and only want a single instance to show in search, a noindex tag on the duplicate pages will streamline the search results.

For webpages you don’t want the public to see at all, noindex effectively blinds the public to them. You might also use noindex tags for outdated pages—like expired sales promotions pages—that you still want to keep for recordkeeping purposes.

Keep in mind, noindex will not immediately deindex the page. You’ll have to wait for Google to crawl the site eventually. 

How to noindex a page

To noindex a page, add a meta robots tag inside the <head> section of the HTML page. Search engine bots and browsers look at the <head> section and pay heed to the instructions enclosed in meta tags. 

Add this html code to the page you want to deindex:

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

or 

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

The <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> line tells Google (and other search engines) not to add this webpage to their index.

There’s an alternative meta robots tag, <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">, which is like a telegram for Google’s search bot. The basic message is the same: “Don’t include this page in your index, please.”

X-robots-tag

Another option is to configure your web server to return an X-robots-tag, a noindex HTTP header for a specific URL. The key difference between this and the regular noindex meta tag is that the X-robots-tag works on any file type, not just HTML. That makes it ideal for telling search engines not to index things like PDFs, images, or video files—anything that doesn’t have a traditional HTML structure where a meta tag can live.

When a bot asks your web server for a particular page, the server sends back not only the page content but special instructions inside the HTTP header. This extra information is like a delivery slip telling the bot details about the file, like its type and how to handle it. This robots tag delivers the instruction directly as part of the HTTP response when a search engine (or any browser) makes a request for the specific URL.

If your website uses an Apache server, you would add the X-robots-tag code to a file called .htaccess, which is usually located in the root directory of your website. In Shopify, the X-robots-tag is implemented within your theme’s code or through a Shopify app to control indexing.

Robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is a simple text-only file stored at the root of your website. It tells search engine crawlers which sections and pages to crawl or not crawl. The main purpose is to manage how crawlers navigate the site, but it can also be used for deindexing. In a robots.txt file, add the Disallow command to show which specific files, directories (folders) they should not access. Or you can disallow an entire website to cloak it from search completely.

For example, disallowing a deprecated product might look like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /products/bad-sneakers.html

Google won’t crawl a page due to a disallow block in robots.txt. Over time, if no other external links point to it, Google will drop the page from the search results, because its bot can’t confirm its existence. Using this robots.txt approach isn’t as instantaneous as removing through Google Search Console, and it isn’t as much of a failsafe as the noindex tag.

Someone might use a robots.txt file because it’s a quick way to prevent search engines from crawling large sections of a site—like admin pages, staging environments, or in-progress content. It’s especially useful for steering bots away from low-value or repetitive pages. This makes it a helpful tool when you want to keep pages out of search without modifying individual page code.

How to reindex a webpage

Sometimes, you’ll need to go the other way and resurrect pages that were formerly deindexed. This is called reindexing.

Say you deindexed some pages so you could make changes. Now you want Google to know about it so they can show those changes in search results again. To do so, you can update the XML sitemap on your server (i.e., the roadmap for every location on your website). This will inform Google about the changes. Go to the Sitemaps section in Google Search Console, tell Google where to find the new sitemap (the URL of your XML sitemap file that’s on the server), and submit.

Google will then visit the pages listed in your roadmap and decide if they should be included or updated in their search listings.