Google Answers If Noindex Is Okay For Altering Sitelinks

Google’s John Mueller answered a question in Reddit about whether it’s okay to no-index a webpage in order to keep it from being shown in the sitelinks.

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Sitelinks, which are clustered links in the search results from one domain and are are typically shown when someone searches for the name or URL of a website.

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For this specific situation, the sitelinks for a real estate website included a link to one of the real estate agents webpage.

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The person asking the question felt that Google should rather pick what they feel is a more important page to show in the sitelinks.

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What they planned to do is to noindex the real estate agent webpage. But they were concerned

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A noindex meta tag is a directive, which means that search engines are obligated to obey the request.

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Google Answers If Noindex Is Okay For Altering Sitelinks