Scenario: Your colleague has told you that they’d like a landing page to not appear in search results. You notice that this landing page URL is already disallowed in robots.txt. What should you do to guarantee the page doesn’t appear in Google’s search results?
- Add a noindex meta tag to the page
- Remove the page’s URL from the robots.txt file and add a noindex meta tag to the page
- Nothing. Because the page URL is already disallowed in robots.txt, it can never appear in Google’s search results
- Remove the meta title and description from the page so that Google can’t display it in SERPs.
Explanation: To guarantee that the landing page doesn’t appear in Google’s search results, the most effective approach is to remove the page’s URL from the robots.txt file and add a noindex meta tag to the page. While the robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers not to crawl specific pages or directories, it doesn’t prevent already indexed pages from appearing in search results. By removing the page’s URL from robots.txt, you allow search engine crawlers to revisit and index the page, but you ensure that they understand not to include it in search results by adding a noindex meta tag to the page’s HTML code. This combination of actions ensures that the page is both excluded from search engine crawlers and marked as not suitable for indexing, effectively preventing it from appearing in Google’s search results. The other options, such as adding only a noindex meta tag or removing the meta title and description, are not as comprehensive or effective in ensuring the page’s exclusion from search results.