Glossary
noindex
Noindex is an instruction, in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header, that tells search engines not to show a page in their results.
It suits pages that are useful to visitors but have no reason to be found: login, cart, account and thank-you pages, internal search results. Once a search engine has read the instruction it drops the page from its results; that can take a while.
Noindex is not the same as blocking a page in robots.txt. A blocked page is not fetched, so the search engine never sees the noindex on it and can still list the address. To keep a page out of results, leave it crawlable and put noindex on it.
A page with noindex should not be in your sitemap and should not be the canonical of other pages. Both send contradicting signals, and the page that was meant to be found is the one that goes missing.
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