Outdated Confidence: high
Source found and quoted correctly, but old enough that the market has changed.
Safe rephrasing
Google stopped honoring noindex rules in robots.txt on Sept. 1, 2019; use a noindex robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP header instead.
What the source says
we're retiring all code that handles unsupported and unpublished rules (such as noindex ) on September 1, 2019.
Google Search Central Blog — A note on unsupported rules in robots.txt (July 2, 2019)
- Commonly cited as
- "Use Noindex: in robots.txt"
- True origin
- Google Search Central Blog — A note on unsupported rules in robots.txt (July 2, 2019)
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- Retired Sept. 1, 2019
- Data as of
- Unsupported since Sept. 1, 2019
- Last checked
- Method & sample
- Official Google Search Central blog announcement.
- Drift between quote and source
- Superseded: the unofficial robots.txt noindex rule stopped working for Googlebot in 2019
- Use the robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header instead
- Interest
- Google operates Google Search and documents its own systems.