I have a question about the behaviour of search engines when they encounter meta name=robots content=noindexIf I use the meta tag format of robots, I know that search engines will not index the contents of the page.What I don't know is whether it also blocks the URL from showing up in search results, or just that particular content with that URL.I'm also wondering if Google's search engine will think it looks like cloaking and penalise accordingly.Some background:We are building a new version of a site which we are releasing in a phased beta rollout.URLs will be the same between old and beta.  What you get to see depends on whether you are opted in to the beta or not.Initially this will be private beta but will then have limited launch (e.g. 20% of public users)Users get automatically opted-in to the new site when they come to it (with the option to go back to the old site if they want)We want the old site still to get indexed by Google etc, but not the new onehttps://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en says this:When Googlebot next crawls that page, Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.I've read a number of things, but nothing that categorically tells me whether the content or the URL is ignored.
How do search engines behave when encountering noindex?
seo;web crawlers;noindex