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§ 2.2.3 ARTICLE
Published VerifiedEvery 6 weeks Sources4 named Authored bySquareRank Team

Indexing · § 2.2.3 · How-to

noindex on Squarespace — hide a page from Google

To hide one page from Google on a Squarespace site, open Page Settings > SEO and check “Hide this page from search results.”3 Squarespace emits <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the page head and removes the page from /sitemap.xml. To hide the entire site, the equivalent toggle lives at Settings > Crawlers > “Block search engines from indexing this site.”4 Both honour Google's canonical noindex specification1.

This leaf covers what noindex actually does, the page-level vs sitewide controls, valid use cases (drafts, thank-you pages, internal-use pages), the crawlability constraint Google names explicitly, and the three gotchas that catch first-time owners.

What noindex actually does

noindex is a directive that tells search engines to not include a page in their searchable index. It's an HTML meta tag (<meta name='robots' content='noindex'>) or an HTTP response header (X-Robots-Tag: noindex). When a search engine crawls the page and sees the directive, it removes the page from the index — the URL still exists, still serves content, still can be visited directly, but no longer appears in search results. All major search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex) honour noindex.

Google's canonical noindex documentation1 describes the directive as the supported method for keeping content out of the index. The page must remain crawlable — if you also block the page in robots.txt, search engines never see the noindex directive and may continue to index the page based on inbound links. This is the most common noindex misconfiguration; the page-level checkbox in Squarespace avoids it by setting noindex in HTML directly.

Page-level noindex on Squarespace

Page Settings > SEO > 'Hide this page from search results' is the single checkbox. Checking it does three things: emits a <meta name='robots' content='noindex'> tag in the page's HTML head, removes the page from /sitemap.xml, and signals to Squarespace's own internal search that the page is hidden. Unchecking it reverses all three. The change propagates within seconds; Google's index updates over the following days to weeks.

The checkbox is per-page, so different pages on the same site can have different settings. A typical pattern: thank-you pages and internal-use pages are noindex; everything else is indexable. The checkbox state is independent of the sitewide Settings > Crawlers toggle; a page can be noindex even when sitewide indexing is allowed.

HTML What Squarespace emits when 'Hide this page from search results' is checked 
 <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> <!-- Page still loads in browsers, still accessible via direct URL --> <!-- Page no longer appears in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo results --> <!-- Page is also omitted from yoursite.com/sitemap.xml -->

Sitewide noindex via Settings > Crawlers

Settings > Crawlers has 'Block search engines from indexing this site'. Checking it emits <meta name='robots' content='noindex'> on every page sitewide, effectively removing the entire site from search results. The toggle is appropriate for development sites, staging environments, and intentionally hidden websites. It's the most common cause of 'my Squarespace site is not on Google' tickets when accidentally left on after a development phase.

The toggle is independent of the AI crawler toggle described in the AI Crawlers cluster. The search-engine toggle controls Googlebot/Bingbot; the AI toggle controls the 26-bot AI training crawler list. Both can be checked or unchecked independently of each other. For a production site that wants search visibility, the search-engine toggle should be unchecked.

When to noindex a page (and when not to)

Five categories of pages should be noindex on most sites: thank-you / confirmation pages (after a form submit or purchase), internal-use pages (team-only links, admin instructions), draft / unfinished pages, intentionally duplicate test pages, and login pages. Pages that should not be noindex: anything you want to rank for, anything you'd be happy for a customer to find via Google, anything in your sitemap intentionally. The default for a new page is indexable; flip to noindex deliberately.

An honest pattern: noindex is sometimes used as a way to "hide" a page from public discovery. It is not a security feature. The page remains accessible at the URL; anyone who knows the URL can visit it. For genuinely private content, use password protection (Page Settings > Advanced > Password) or member-area gating — both prevent unauthenticated access entirely.

What noindex actually does on Squarespace

3

things the page-level checkbox does: emit noindex meta, omit from sitemap, hide from internal search.

Squarespace Help · 2026
Sitewide

scope of Settings > Crawlers checkbox — emits noindex on every page on the domain.

Squarespace Help · 2026
2-6 wks

typical timeline for Google to recognise a noindex'd page and remove it from the index.

Google Search Central · 2025-12-10

The crawlability constraint: noindex must be visible to the crawler

Google's documentation is explicit: for noindex to work, Googlebot must be able to crawl the page and see the directive. If the page is blocked in robots.txt — preventing the crawl — Google never reads the noindex tag and may continue to index the URL based on inbound links. The cleaner pattern is always to use noindex without also blocking in robots.txt. Squarespace handles this correctly by default: the Page Settings checkbox emits noindex in HTML without adding any robots.txt block.

The misconfiguration to avoid: editing robots.txt (typically via Code Injection workarounds) to Disallow: a page that is also marked noindex via Page Settings. The robots.txt block prevents Googlebot from fetching the page, which prevents Googlebot from seeing the noindex tag, which means Google may keep the URL in the index based on links pointing to it1. The fix is removing the robots.txt block; the Page Settings noindex alone is sufficient.

Three Squarespace-specific noindex gotchas

First: pages set to noindex during a draft phase can be forgotten — owners launch with key pages still hidden from Google. Audit before launch. Second: a noindex page can still rank temporarily based on inbound links (Google takes 2-6 weeks to fully drop it from the index). Third: the page-level checkbox honours individual pages, but blog posts noindex differently — each post has its own checkbox in the post's own Settings, not in the parent blog page.

A fourth pattern worth knowing: changing a noindex page back to indexable (un-checking the box) does not immediately re-add it to Google's index. The page is added back to /sitemap.xml within seconds, but Google's re-crawl and re-indexing typically takes 1-3 weeks. To expedite, use Search Console's URL Inspection → Request Indexing on the un-noindex'd page.

Keep reading · § 2.2.3