Why is Google Looking to Stop No Index Directive in Robots.txt? Reasons Unveiled

It’s the official statement by Google that the robot.txt no index rules do not exist anymore as these are unsupportive and unpublished rules as per the exclusive protocol. Now there won’t be any index directives listed within the robots.txt files.

There were many speculations arising since last many days amongst people.

“Is Google going to stop supporting noindex directive in robots.txt?” 

But now when it has come, people have to look for other options other than using no index options in robot.txt. Some had though like robots.txt is no more. But this is a misconception as they have to clearly understand the things before creating hype for the same.

The day this announcement was made that Google will stop supporting robots.txt noindex, people were left vulnerable on how to handle things when they need to disallow the pages and functions to get crawled by the search engine.

Is There Any alternative to No Index directive?

As per Google, here are the certain alternatives for those who completely rely on robots.txt noindex rules that actually keep control on crawling activities. Many people who think that what’s the use of robot.txt is if no index rule is being scraped off. But they can’t judge why robots.txt is still here as there are many uses of this file other than having no index attribute.

As per new seo strategies 2019, there are certain alternates that you can implement; being a regular user of robots.txt for using no-index crawled.

• 404 and 410 HTTP status codes
• Password protection option
• Disallow in robots.txt
• Webmaster search console remove URL tool

What made Google Think about Stopping No-index Directives? 

Google was actually thinking about changing this protocol from last many years but now it has actually moved forward after analyzing the usage of robots.txt rules which seems like being misused. The search engine is now looking forward to going through the unsupported implementations such as crawl delay, no follow, and no index. Earlier there were no such rules to be documented by Google. In actuality, their usage in Googlebot is low. This mistake is actually hurting the website presence in Google search results.

The query is still unanswered

Why is Google going to stop supporting the noindex directive in robots.txt?

Here is the answer is given by Google through a tweet

“Today we’re saying goodbye to undocumented and unsupported rules in robots.txt
If you were relying on these rules, learn about your options in our blog post.”

This is the relevant part of the announcement:

“In the interest of maintaining a healthy ecosystem and preparing for potential future open source releases, we’re retiring all code that handles unsupported and unpublished rules (such as noindex) on September 1, 2019.“

Conclusion
As you all are now aware that Google will stop supporting robots.txt noindex from 1st September 2019, certain measures are to be applied by the webmaster to change the coding accordingly before things get messed up and unwanted pages get crawled by Google along with necessary files.

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