X-Robots-Tag Checker
Inspect the HTTP headers of any URL (HTML pages, PDFs, images) to check for X-Robots-Tag indexing directives.
Try URLs for HTML pages, PDFs, images, or API endpoints.
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What is the X-Robots-Tag?
The `X-Robots-Tag` is an HTTP header sent by your web server that functions similarly to the HTML `<meta name="robots">` tag. However, while meta tags only work on HTML documents, the `X-Robots-Tag` can be applied to any file type.
This makes it the only effective way to prevent search engines from indexing non-HTML files such as PDFs, images (JPG, PNG), videos, or plain text documents.
Protecting Non-HTML Files
If you have an internal PDF document or a private image, putting a rule in `robots.txt` might stop crawling, but Google can still index the URL if someone links to it. Only an `X-Robots-Tag: noindex` will force Google to remove the PDF from search results.
Server-Level Control
By configuring your Apache or Nginx server, you can apply an `X-Robots-Tag` conditionally across an entire directory (e.g., forcing `noindex` on all `.doc` files or a specific staging environment) without modifying the application code.
Frequently Asked Questions
<FilesMatch "\.pdf$">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"
</FilesMatch>
location ~* \.pdf$ {
add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow";
}
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