Wikipedia:Controlling search engine indexing

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:INDEXING WP:NOINDEX

There are a variety of ways in which Wikipedia attempts to control search engine indexing, commonly termed "noindexing" on Wikipedia. The default behavior is that articles older than 90 days are indexed. All of the methods rely on using the noindex HTML meta tag, which tells search engines not to index certain pages. Respecting the tag, especially in terms of removing already indexed content, is up to the individual search engine, and in theory the tag may be ignored entirely.

The control methods are:

1. Controlling an entire namespace, via MediaWiki software settings
2. Controlling classes of pages, via MediaWiki:Robots.txt (Wikipedia's Robots.txt file)
3. Controlling individual pages by adding the __NOINDEX__ magic word into them, either directly or using the {{NOINDEX}} template, however articles are a special case, see #Indexing of articles ("mainspace").
4. Controlling multiple pages by adding the __NOINDEX__ magic word into standard templates used in certain situations (same caveat as in the third point).