: How can I stop Google from indexing "pretty links" external redirects from my WordPress site? When I search site:[example].com in Google for my blog, the majority of the pages that are being

@Welton855

Add

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive,unavailable_after:[date]"/>


at the head of pages you want to exclude from Google search, where [date] should be a date in the past to tell Googlebot that the page should no longer be available at present.

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@Ogunnowo487

Google doesn't index links, it indexes pages.

It seems that the pages that these pretty links point to like example.org/clickout/5 don't have a proper robots setting or http status code to let Google know that you don't want these pages in the index.

Have you tried the following?


Add a meta robots noindex to the intermediate clickout pages? This will stop Google from indexing the intermediate clickout pages.
Switch to non-pretty external links that are tracked using Javascript click events (for instance using Google Analytics?)
Use a tool like httpstatus.io/ to check the http status codes that the intermediate page is returning. As Stephen noted, if these are 301 it's unlikely that these clickout pages will get indexed themselves.


[Edit] Removed suggestion to block the intermediate URLs in robots.txt, added suggestion to check http status code.

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