noindex

noindex is the right tool for pages that need to exist but shouldn't rank — thank-you pages, internal search results, staging content, thin tag archives. The critical gotcha is that Google must crawl the page to see the directive, so never block a URL in robots.txt and expect noindex to work; a blocked page can still appear as a bare link. Deliver it via the meta robots tag or the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and pair it with follow if you still want link equity to flow through the page.