# Google notification to remove "noindex" statements from robots.txt **URL:** \ **Category:** Support\ **Created:** [July 29, 2019, 10:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/google-notification-to-remove-noindex-statements-from-robots-txt/124265 "2019-07-29T10:28:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 11
**Author:** ![awesomerobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/awesomerobot/32/142900_2.png) [@awesomerobot](https://meta.discourse.org/u/awesomerobot)\ **Post date:** [July 29, 2019, 2:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/google-notification-to-remove-noindex-statements-from-robots-txt/124265/11 "2019-07-29T14:37:08Z")
**If you haven’t customized your `robots.txt` file you won’t need to do anything** … `disallow` is already doing most of the work. By default Discourse uses both `disallow` and `noindex` in robots.txt. In the [blog post about this update](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt.html) Google suggests using `disallow`, which we already do. We use `noindex` in addition to help avoid this linking issue Google mentions (I added emphasis to the relevant bit)… > **Disallow in robots.txt:** Search engines can only index pages that they know about, so blocking the page from being crawled usually means its content won’t be indexed. **While the search engine may also index a URL based on links from other pages, without seeing the content itself, we aim to make such pages less visible in the future.** On our end we’ll look at making an update to add the `noindex` meta tag or use the `X-Robots-Tag` header in our HTTP responses to make sure Google’s not indexing the link when it appears on other pages (we’ll update this topic with any changes). If you’ve added custom `noindex` rules to `robots.txt` via your `/admin/customize/robots` admin page, you should change them to `disallow` --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/google-notification-to-remove-noindex-statements-from-robots-txt/124265)._