Best practices for types of pages not to index

[RichHamilton_qcs]

Trying to better understand best practices for when and when not use a content="noindex".  Are there certain types of pages that we shouldn't want Google to index?  Contact form pages, privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive pages (using wordpress).  Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[marceldigital]

This post is deleted!

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi there,

Really any pages that you would not want returned to a user in the SERPs. Does the site contain sensitive personal information in some sort of customer profile? If so, you would want to index these pages.

I would not noindex contact form pages (valuable for users to be able to find) but internal search pages would be a good candidate as well as 'thank you' pages. If you have an ecommerce website, noindexing the shopping cart would be another smart idea.

As for archive pages, I tend to handle these with a canonical tag.

Hope this helps!

[donsilvernail]

Hi Richard,

Some archive pages in WordPress can produce significant traffic. Especial if the articles that reside under the archive are informative and the tag or category you use is a good keyword and provides value. So i only no index archives that have no real value.

Contact forms are up to you. Does the form sit on a landing page you want visitors? Or is it an internal link for data collection. A determination on what should be indexed or no indexed is what pages bring value to potential visitors. Many internal search pages bring no value to a user searching for your content on google. So these could be no index. User archives could be no index especial if the user is not an author of content on your site.

Thanks,

Don Silvernal

[seoman10]

Need to be clear on the purpose of "no-index".  Search engines will still crawl the page, but in theory will not be published in the index.  Some search engines may still choose to index the page despite no-index tag.  Also that page will still be publicly accessible on your website.

As already noted a couple of times I would be very slow to noindex any page.

I can't think of very many applications where it would be used. The way I view it is either something is public or its private, if it's public you properly want search engines to find it, or if it's private it should be locked away behind a username and password.