De-Index

In SEO, “de-index” refers to the process or event where a webpage or a set of webpages are removed from a search engine’s index. When a page is de-indexed, it will not appear in the search engine results, even if someone searches for its specific URL or title.

Here’s a more detailed explanation:

Search engines like Google crawl the web, indexing pages to return as results when users conduct searches. Sometimes, for various reasons, you might not want a page or a set of pages to be indexed and visible in search results.

To achieve this, there are a few methods you can use:

Robots.txt

You can use this file to request search engines not to crawl certain parts of your site. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the pages won’t be indexed. If other pages on the web link to it, the page might still get indexed without being crawled.

Meta Robots Tag

Placing a `noindex` tag in the HTML of a page is a more direct way to tell search engines not to index that page.

Using Search Console

For Google, you can use the “Removals” tool in Google Search Console to temporarily remove a URL from Google’s search results.

In summary, de-indexing in SEO refers to removing a webpage from a search engine’s index, ensuring it doesn’t appear in search results. Whether done intentionally by the website owner or as a penalty from the search engine, the page won’t get organic search traffic from that search engine.