Why We Noindex Sign-In and Sign-Up Pages
Why We Noindex Sign-In and Sign-Up Pages
Release: v0.1.69
SEO Control: SEO-09
Category: SEO & Crawlability
Background
The /sign-in and /sign-up pages on the sanctions screening platform are public routes — they are reachable without authentication. While this is necessary for the application to function, it also means search engine crawlers can discover and attempt to index these pages.
Auth pages are considered thin-content pages: they contain no substantive information about the product, serve no informational purpose in search results, and would actively confuse a user who lands on them from an organic search query.
The Problem
Without explicit robots metadata, crawlers apply their own heuristics and may choose to index these pages. Two concrete consequences arise:
- Crawl budget waste. Search engines allocate a finite crawl budget per domain. Crawling auth pages consumes that budget at the expense of high-value content pages (dashboards, documentation, feature pages).
- Poor search result quality. A user clicking a
/sign-inresult from a search engine lands on a login form with no context — a confusing dead end that damages trust.
The Fix
From v0.1.69, both the sign-in and sign-up pages export an explicit robots metadata object using Next.js's built-in Metadata API:
import type { Metadata } from 'next';
export const metadata: Metadata = {
robots: {
index: false,
follow: false,
},
};
This renders the following <meta> tag in the page <head>:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
What noindex, nofollow means
| Directive | Effect |
|---|---|
noindex | The page is excluded from search engine indexes |
nofollow | Links on the page are not crawled or passed link equity |
Using both directives together is the most conservative and correct posture for auth pages: there is no value in indexing them, and no reason to have crawlers follow links away from them.
Affected Pages
/sign-in— User authentication page/sign-up— New account registration page
Impact on Compliance Teams
This change is transparent to end users. Existing bookmarks, direct links, and application routing are unaffected. The only change is that these pages will no longer appear in search engine results, which is the intended behaviour.