How do I prohibit indexing of the site or pages?

Prohibiting a site, section or a page from indexing

If some pages or sections of the site shouldn't be indexed (for example, the ones that contain technical or confidential information), use the following methods to restrict access to them:

• In the robots.txt file, specify the Disallow directive.
• Specify the robots meta tag with the noindex or none directive in the HTML code of the site pages. For more information, see Robots meta tag and HTTP header X-Robots-Tag section.
• Use authorization on the site. We recommend this method to hide the home page from indexing. If the main page is prohibited in the robots.txt file or with the noindex meta tag but there are links leading to it, the page can be included in the search results.

Prohibiting page indexing

Hide part of the page text from indexing

• Add the noindex element in the HTML code of the page. Examples:

  <noindex>text that shouldn't be indexed</noindex>

  The element is not sensitive to nesting — it can be located anywhere in the HTML code of the page. If there is no closing tag on the page, the entire contents of the page is considered hidden. Don't create multiple nested noindex tags because markup will ignore everything after the first closing tag.

  You can use the tag in the following format if necessary for making the site code valid:

  <!--noindex-->text that shouldn't be indexed<!--/noindex-->

• Add the noscript element in the HTML code of the page. Examples:

  <noscript>text that shouldn't be indexed</noscript>

  The noscript element, just like noindex, prohibits indexing but hides the site's content from the user if their browser supports JavaScript.

  Note. JavaScript is supported by all popular browsers if this feature is not specifically disabled by the user.

  You can view the report about JavaScript support in Yandex.Metrica .

Hide a link on a page from indexing

To hide all links on the page from indexing, in the HTML code of the page, specify the robots meta tag with the nofollow directive. The robot will not follow links when crawling the site, but it can find out about them from other sources. For example, on other pages or sites.

You can also add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link. Examples:

<a href="url" rel="nofollow">link text</a>  

The rel="nofollow" attribute is perceived by the robot as a recommendation to ignore the link.

When using any of the listed instructions, the link can be processed by the robot and displayed in Yandex.Webmaster as internal or external. The display or absence of the link in Yandex.Webmaster doesn't mean that the search algorithms consider it in any way.