WordPress Noindex Plugins to Stop Search Engines from Indexing Content

Last Updated November 6th, 2023

You don’t always want search engines like Google indexing your site’s content. Often, you will have pages you would prefer that didn’t show in search engine results. The reasons for this are varied. It might be light or thin content that might negatively impact SEO. Duplicate content, another SEO concern, is also a common reason to prevent search engines from adding pages to results. This process of denying search engine crawlers is called noindexing. There are specific noindex tags you have to add to a page to get a search engine to ignore it. Instead of adding these tags manually, you can use a WordPress noindex plugin to handle the job for you. Let’s take a look at some of the best options available today.

---

Popular WordPress Noindex Plugins

All of the WordPress noindex plugins on our list are available, today, from WordPress.org. You can download and install them in a few minutes. Or, if you would prefer, you can install and activate these plugins directly inside of the WordPress admin.

Each of these plugins on the list has been checked and summarized by us. We’ve done our best to tell you what each plugin has in terms of features and how they can help you. We recommend trying several of these plugins out to find the right one for your current requirements.

Noindex Pages

NoIndex Pages is a simple and lightweight plugin that gives you the option to hide specific pages from search engines. The plugin adds a check box above each page’s publish box to achieve this easily and without hassle. NoIndex Pages places a meta tag within the section of the selected page. This tag gives a heads-up to robots that the page should not be indexed by search engines. By default, this effect only automatically applies to your site’s pages. However, this does not mean it is limited to that. If you wish to extend its features to other sections of your site such as its posts or other custom post types, you may do so with minimal code.

Plugin Details

Easy Noindex And Nofollow

Easy Noindex and Nofollow is a WordPress plugin that stops your posts and pages from appearing on search engines. It is light and simple with not much room for customization. The plugin is quick and effortless to install as all you need is to upload its folder to the WordPress plugins directory. Next, activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress. In the settings, there is both a checkbox for the noindex and nofollow features. This gives you the choice to enable or disable them. Once added, they are applied to your site’s posts, pages, searches, and category pages as well.

Plugin Details

Noindex Attachment Pages

Noindex Attachment Pages adds the meta noindex tags to the attachment pages in your WordPress site. This in turn helps you further customize and cater to your search engine optimization and results. The plugin helps you in deciding what pages you want and don’t want to appear in search engines. With the aid of WordPress Theme Hierarchy, this plugin links images and multimedia files, posts, and pages to the attachment page. This then allows the noindex tag to be inserted into them. The installation is easy as well. All you’d need to do is upload the plugin’s folder to the wp-content/plugins directory and activate it through the Plugins menu in WordPress.

Plugin Details

noindex SEO

NoIndex SEO is a plugin that allows you to block the indexing of certain areas of your WordPress site by adding a meta tag to it. This in turn prevents them from appearing in search engines. You may apply this effect to main pages such as the front page and home of your site. It also works on individual pages and posts. Taxonomies, such as the site’s categories and tags, may be removed from indexing if you wish. Time and date also play a part, wherein blocking can depend on date-based archive pages, or when daily, monthly, hourly, or yearly archives occur. Any archive page and post type archive can be affected, as well as an author’s page or any of their works specifically. You also have the option to go as far as blocking pagination, internal searches, attachments, previews, and error pages.

Plugin Details

---

---

Duplicate Content Cure

Duplicate Content Cure is a very light and simple WordPress noindex plugin that improves how your WordPress site interacts with search engines. The way that it accomplishes this is by stopping any search engine spiders or bots from finding and indexing different areas of your site. This plugin is commonly used on pages for archives, tags, and categories. These especially are the types of pages that tend to contain duplicate content from other areas of your site. The plugin adds nofollow and noindex to these pages to effectively hide them from bots.

Plugin Details

Bulk NoIndex & NoFollow Toolkit

Bulk NoIndex & NoFollow Toolkit is a WordPress plugin that aids webmasters in eliminating the hassle of locating and getting rid of thin pages in your website. These are pages you would prefer to be excluded from search engine indexes and results.

This plugin comes equipped with an interface that allows further customization and sorting. Your posts may be sorted by word count and character count. You may noindex and nofollow posts and thinner pages with built in WordPress bulk edit features if you wish. It is important to note that this plugin does not yet support analyzing custom post types. It only works with posts and pages at the moment.

Bulk NoIndex & NoFollow Toolkit is especially useful as it cuts time in the noindex and nofollow process. Typically, one would usually apply these effects manually per page. It quickly noindexes content identified by web crawlers and easily controls the meta tag directives on many of your pages all at once. 

Plugin Details

Noindex Password-Protected Posts

Noindex Password Protected Posts is a very simple and specific addition to the other noindex plugins that exist for WordPress sites. The plugin is advertised to do one thing and one thing only: automatically add noindex tags to any password-protected posts that may exist within your site. 

For whatever privacy reasons you may have, you might wish to exclude protected posts from search engine results. This plugin is your answer. Adding the tag to your posts effectively allows the bots to skip over these posts when indexing search engines. That will leave them out of the results on Google or any other respectable search engines.

Plugin Details

noindex Past Events

Noindex Past Events is a plugin that actually exists as an add-on for another plugin: Modern Tribe’s The Events Calendar. Its function is to simply and automatically add a noindex meta tag on the pages of events that have already happened or passed their end date. Adding this tag blocks these event detail pages from being indexed by search engines such as Google or Bing. This will help in preventing them from appearing in search results. An important note is that the effects only apply the next time your site is indexed by the search engine. So there is a chance your past events may still appear in research engine results for a few days.

Plugin Details

Noindex Author

Noindex Author targets any and all posts on your WordPress site written by a specific author that you may wish to exclude from appearing or being found on search engine result pages. This plugin impressively noindexes posts from these certain authors without having to modify any code. It is fortunately compatible with most, if not all, of the available WordPress themes. After installation, head over to your WordPress admin and look for it in the plugins section. It can then be activated and you may now add noindex and nofollow meta for all author posts.

Plugin Details

---

Find the Best WordPress Noindex Plugin

That’s the end of our look at the best WordPress noindex plugins you can use right now. They serve the same purpose, noindexing content, but some have more specific features compared to others. For example, we highlighted plugins built solely for hiding password-protected content, author pages, and even posts from third-party plugins.

Remember, these plugins are all free so give several a try if you are unsure of which to go with. A lot of times, plugins with the same features separate themselves by their interfaces and ease of use. With the right research and experimentation, you will find the right noindex plugin for your WordPress site.

Of course, before we wrap this up, please keep in mind that not being careful with noindex tags can be a real problem. Make sure you are noindexing only content you want to exclude from search engines and not your normal, high-quality content. A simple mistake here could lead to disastrous effects on your site’s search engine optimization.

---

Looking for More Ways to Improve WordPress?

Are you a WordPress developer or owner of a WordPress-powered agency? Then you will want to take a moment to learn about our White Label WordPress plugin. With White Label, you can customize and tweak the WordPress admin to improve the experience for your clients.

White Label comes with dozens of features to help you change and rebrand WordPress. You can use our plugin to create a custom login page, swap out and replace logos, build new color schemes, and much more. Hide or rename menus, adjust plugin text, and turn off those annoying plugin nags and notifications.

Take a look at the plugin’s full feature list to learn everything White Label can do for you.

---

Related Posts from Our WordPress Blog