Noindex vs nofollow: the difference in two minutes

Noindex vs nofollow comes down to one question: are you controlling a page or its links? noindex keeps a page out of Google's results. nofollow concerns links, either a single link (as rel="nofollow") or every link on a page (as a robots meta rule). They are often written together, but they do different jobs.

Side by side

	noindex	nofollow
Acts on	The page itself	Links: one, or all on the page
Where it goes	Robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header	`rel` on a link, or robots meta tag / header
Google treats it as	A rule: the page is dropped from results	A hint since 2019
Hides the page	Yes, if Google can crawl it	No

What noindex does

Google's block indexing guide says that when Googlebot crawls a page and finds noindex, Google drops that page from Search results entirely, even if other sites link to it.

There is one condition. Google has to be able to fetch the page to see the tag. If robots.txt blocks the page, the noindex is never read and the URL can still appear in results. Google also says it does not support noindex inside robots.txt.

What nofollow does

On a link, rel="nofollow" says you'd rather Google not associate your site with the linked page. On a page, Google's robots meta documentation defines nofollow as "Do not follow the links on this page."

Since Google's 2019 change, nofollow is a hint, and since March 1, 2020 that includes crawling and indexing. Google said relying on nofollow to keep a page out of the index was never recommended.

Three mix-ups that cause real problems

Using nofollow to hide a page. People link to a private page with rel="nofollow" and expect it to stay out of Google. It won't. Google's outbound links guide notes that linked pages can still be found through sitemaps or links from other sites.

Blocking a page in robots.txt and adding noindex. The two cancel out. Because Google can't fetch the page, it never reads the noindex, and the URL can still show up in results if other pages link to it.

Putting nofollow on internal links to steer Google. For links within your own site, Google's guide points to a robots.txt disallow rule, not nofollow. Most of the time you want Google to follow your internal links, because that is how it reaches your deeper pages.

When to use which

Thank-you pages, staging copies, internal search results: noindex. Add nofollow only if you also don't want the page's links used.
A paid link: rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" on that link. Google's spam policies require one of them.
A comment link: rel="ugc".
A thin page that still links to your other pages: noindex on its own. A page-wide nofollow there would stop Google using that page as a route to the rest of your site.

The combined forms

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="none">

Google treats none as shorthand for noindex, nofollow. For PDFs and other files without HTML, send the same values in an X-Robots-Tag header. If rules conflict, Google applies the most restrictive one.

What about "index, follow"?

You don't need to write it. Google's documentation says the default value, all, means no restrictions on indexing or serving and has no effect if you list it. It also says that without a nofollow rule, Google may use the page's links to discover other pages. So noindex on its own already leaves the links usable. Only add the values that change something.

Checking a page

The indexing checker on seogeoaeo.ai reads one URL's status code, robots.txt rules for Google and Bing, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag directives, and canonical, then names the signal that blocks indexing. It costs 8 credits per run. It cannot confirm whether Google has actually indexed the URL; Search Console's URL Inspection does that.