Backlinked page not indexable

Severity: Warning
Impact: High
Effort to fix: Low
Issue code: backlinked_not_indexable

Why it matters

Other websites link to this page, but it is noindexed, canonicalised elsewhere or blocked by robots.txt, so it cannot rank from those links.

How to fix it

Make the page indexable if it should rank, or redirect it to the page that should receive the links.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Internal Linking score 3 points, plus up to 12 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. Weakens rankings, crawling or measurement. Fix after critical issues.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Backlinked page not indexable. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (high) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code backlinked_not_indexable. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.

Guides that cover this issue

Import backlinks from Search Console, Ahrefs or Semrush