Why Google Still Indexes Web Pages That Are Blocked
Understanding why Google sometimes indexes web pages that are blocked can be confusing for website owners. After all, you’ve likely used robots.txt or the noindex tag to prevent certain pages from showing up in search results. Yet, despite your efforts, these blocked pages may still appear in Google's index. In this article, we’ll dive into how Google’s indexing works, common reasons for blocking pages, and why they may still get indexed. We’ll also cover best practices to ensure your content remains properly controlled and blocked from search engines when needed. How Google Indexing Works To fully grasp why blocked pages might still be indexed, it’s important to understand Google’s web indexing process . Indexing refers to how search engines store and organize web pages they crawl so they can be quickly retrieved in search results. Google uses automated programs known as crawlers (or Googlebots ) to visit websites and gather information from their pages. Once crawled, G