Control what information Google sees on your site and what is shown in Search results.
Why block content from Google?
Why block content from Google?There are a few reasons you might want to hide content from Google:
To keep your data private
You might have private data hosted on your site that you want to keep other users from accessing. This is often the case for data such as site member contact information, which should be blocked from Google in order to prevent that member data from coming up in Google Search results.
To hide content of less value to your audience
Your website might have the same content in different places, which could negatively affect your page rankings in Google Search. A good example of where duplicate content can arise is a site-wide search function to help users navigate site content. Some search functions generate and display custom search results pages every time any user enters a query. Google can crawl all the custom search results pages individually if they are not blocked. As a result, Google sees a site with many similar pages and might categorize the duplicate content as spam, which could undermine page rankings in Google Search.
Your website might share information generated by other third-party sources, which is available in other places on the web. Google sees less value in including your pages that include large amounts of duplicate content in Google Search results. You can block the copied content to improve what Google sees and boost your page rankings in Google Search.
To have Google focus on your important content
If you have a very large site (many thousands of URLs) and pages with less important content, or if you have a lot of duplicate content, you might want to prevent Google from crawling the duplicate or less important pages in order to focus on your more important content.
How to block content
Here are the main ways to block content from appearing in Google:
| Content type | Method | Description |
|---|---|---|
| All types | Remove the content | Removing content from your site is the surest way to ensure that it won't appear in Google Search, or anywhere. If the information is already appearing in Google, you might need to take additional steps. |
| All types | Password-protect your files |
If you have confidential or private content that you don't want to appear in Google Search results, the simplest and most effective way to block private URLs from appearing is to store them in a password-protected directory on your site server. Googlebot and all other web crawlers are unable to access content in password-protected directories. Advanced users: If you're using Apache Web Server, you can edit your .htaccess file to password-protect the directory on your server. There are a lot of tools on the web that will let you do this easily. |
| Images | robots.txt and/or emergency image removal request | Use robots.txt rules to block images. Images can be completely blocked from Search results using robots.txt, unlike web pages, which will not be crawled by Google, but can still appear in Search results even if blocked by robots.txt rules. |
| Web pages | noindex directive |
|
| Web pages | Opt out of specific Google properties | You can tell Google not to include content from your site in specific Google properties, rather than all Google properties. |
| Search result snippets | nosnippet Meta tag | Append a <meta name="nosnippet"> tag to your page to prevent a snippet from appearing in search. However, note that this can generate a confusing message in search results ("no snippet available") |
Remove existing content from Google
If the content already exists on Google, and you want to remove it, you might need to take additional steps.
