Translations:Help:Controlling search engine indexing/1/en

There are a variety of ways in which MediaWiki allows users to attempt to control search engine indexing, commonly termed "noindexing", as the default position is that pages are indexed. Most of the methods rely on using the noindex HTML meta tag, which tells search engines not to index certain pages. Respecting the tag, or the robots.txt file, especially in terms of removing already indexed content, is up to the individual search engine, and in theory they may be ignored entirely.