Editorial standards
Why some pages are not indexed
We keep thin pages out of search engines on purpose. This is exactly how we decide, and why a page can be worth visiting but still marked “noindex.”
HospitalPricer generates a page for every hospital, code, procedure, city, state, and health system in our data. Not all of them deserve a place in search results. A page earns indexing only when it delivers a real multi-hospital comparison — not a near-duplicate of a thinner page. Everything below a threshold stays fully accessible and linked, but carries a noindex tag and is excluded from our sitemap.
The thresholds we actually use
These are applied automatically from live data — the same values gate both the page and the sitemap, so a page is never indexable-but-hidden or the reverse:
- State pages (example) — need at least 3 hospitals with data. A state is a broad claim; one or two hospitals is a thin shell barely richer than the hospital pages beneath it.
- City pages (example) — need at least 2 hospitals. Two is the minimum for a genuine local comparison; a single-hospital city just duplicates that hospital’s own page.
- Health-system pages (directory) — need at least 2 hospitals. A one-hospital “system” is a near-duplicate of that hospital’s detail page.
- Procedure-in-a-place pages (“MRI cost in Chicago”) — need at least 2 hospitals publishing the procedure locally, to avoid thin doorway pages.
- CPT / HCPCS code pages (codes) — need at least 2 publishing hospitals, so a code page is a comparison, not a single data point.
Why we hold this line
Search engines — and the ad networks that fund free tools like this one — reward sites that publish genuinely useful pages and penalize thin, repetitive, auto-generated ones. Indexing every possible permutation would inflate our page count while lowering the quality of what a searcher finds. We would rather have a smaller index of pages that each answer a real question.
Noindex is not hidden
A noindex page is still a first-class page: it loads normally, is linked from its parent (a one-hospital city is linked from its state page and that hospital), and becomes indexed automatically the moment enough hospitals publish data to make it a real comparison. Nothing is deleted or hidden — it simply waits until it clears the bar.
This is part of how we keep the site trustworthy. For the rest, see how we verify hospital price data, what “selected prices” means, and our editorial policy.
Frequently asked questions
- If a page is noindex, can I still use it?
- Yes. Noindex only asks search engines not to list the page; it stays fully accessible on the site and linked from its parent pages. We noindex thin pages, not private ones.
- Why not index every page to get more traffic?
- Indexing near-duplicate or single-hospital pages would flood search results with thin, repetitive content — bad for visitors and against search-quality guidelines. We would rather have fewer, genuinely useful indexed pages than a large index of thin ones.
- What makes a page 'thin' here?
- A page that just repeats a single hospital's data under a broader label — for example a 'city' page with one hospital, or a 'state' page with one or two. It offers little the underlying hospital page doesn't already provide.
- Will a noindex page become indexed later?
- Yes, automatically, once it crosses the threshold. As more hospitals in a city or state publish data, the page becomes a real comparison and is added to the sitemap and index. The thresholds are applied from live data, not hand-curated.