SiteAud!tLint Support

Warning Technical SEO

Noindex directive

Severity
Warning
Impact
High
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
noindex

Why it matters

The page tells search engines not to include it in results, through a meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header.

How to fix it

Remove the noindex directive if this page should appear in search results.

What this means

The page tells search engines not to index it, through a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. The evidence shows which one, for example noindex, follow or X-Robots-Tag: noindex.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Is this intended?

Noindex is the right tool for pages that should exist but not appear in search: thank-you pages, internal search results, account pages, thin tag archives. This issue is a warning so you can confirm every noindex is deliberate, because a wrong one removes a page from search completely.

PageUsually
Thank-you, cart, account, internal searchIntended
Tag or archive pages with little contentOften intended
Product, service, category or article pagesA mistake
Every pageA staging or development setting left on

Common causes of an unintended noindex

  • "Discourage search engines" left on after launch, such as the WordPress setting under Settings > Reading.
  • An SEO plugin rule applying noindex to a whole post type or taxonomy.
  • An X-Robots-Tag header set at the server or CDN, which does not appear in the page source.
  • A staging environment's config deployed to production.

How to fix it

  1. Decide whether the page should be in search.
  2. If yes, remove the noindex from the template, plugin setting or server header that adds it.
  3. If no, also keep it out of the XML sitemap. See Non-indexable URL in XML sitemap.
  4. Do not block a noindex page in robots.txt: search engines must crawl it to see the noindex.

Verify the fix

Recrawl. Then request indexing for important pages in Google Search Console with URL Inspection, so Google sees the change sooner.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the Technical SEO 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 Noindex directive. 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 noindex. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.