Key takeaways
- Thin PR posts and campaign landing pages can drag on how search engines judge your site overall.
- Marking them noindex keeps them out of search while they still work for the campaign.
- Also exclude them from on-site search, RSS feeds and your XML sitemap so they do not crowd real content.
Why keep ad content out of search
Sponsored posts and landing pages are written to convert a specific campaign, not to be great search results. When a lot of thin, promotional pages are indexed, they can dilute the quality signals for your site as a whole — search engines see a mix of strong articles and shallow ad pages. Keeping the ad pages out of the index lets your genuine content represent you.
What noindex actually does
noindex is a small robots directive that tells search engines not to list a page in their results. The page still loads normally for anyone who visits it — from your ad, an email, or a direct link — so it keeps doing its campaign job. It simply does not compete in organic search.
Beyond noindex: feeds, sitemap and on-site search
For a clean result, do not stop at the robots directive. Exclude campaign pages from your RSS feed and your XML sitemap so you are not actively advertising them to crawlers, and drop them from on-site search so readers browsing your site are not led into ad pages. Finally, mark the money links themselves with rel="sponsored".
Doing it on WordPress
Applying all of that by hand to every campaign page is easy to forget. The tidy approach is to mark a post as a PR or landing page and let a plugin apply the whole set at once.
PressHangar PR/LP Manager flags a post as PR/LP, applies noindex, removes it from search, feeds and the sitemap, and outputs sponsored links with the correct rel attributes.
Frequently asked questions
- Won't noindex hurt traffic to that page?
- These pages usually get their traffic from ads, emails and direct links rather than organic search, so noindex costs them little — and it protects the rest of your site's standing.
- Is noindex the same as nofollow?
- No. noindex says 'do not list this page'. nofollow and rel="sponsored" are signals about links, not about whether the page is indexed.
- Should every sponsored post be noindex?
- Not necessarily. Genuinely useful sponsored content, clearly disclosed, can be indexed. Reserve noindex for thin or purely promotional pages — it is a judgment call.