I removed the 404 pages from GSC "Removals" tool. After that can I add robots meta tag in HTML code for permanently removing the pages

Question

Please let me know whether adding the robots meta tag to these pages is possible after removing all 404 pages using the GSC "Removals" tool. Although the deleted pages from GSC are only being removed temporarily, I would like to add a "robots meta tag" to permanently remove them. Are developers able to add the code to these pages? Or exist any alternative approaches to resolving this problem?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You need to make sure your pages are true 404 pages, that is, that they return the HTTP 404 status code. You can use a tool like httpstatus to do check the status code of your URLs. If your pages are properly 404 (not 200), then your job is done - those URLs are permanently removed and will not be re-indexed.

A <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag is not necessary or useful in this case. That tag is used for when you want a page of content to be visible to users but not indexed in search engines. In contrast, a 404 status code is used when you want to signal that a URL is entirely gone, devoid of content, and should be forgotten both by users and search engines.