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.

Where noindex comes from

A meta tag in the head: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.
An X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header, often set by a server rule or CDN, so it does not show in the page source.
A CMS setting. In WordPress, Settings > Reading > Discourage search engines adds noindex to every page, and SEO plugins can noindex whole post types or archives.
A staging setting copied to the live site during launch.

Intended or not?

Noindex is right for thank-you pages, internal search results, cart and account pages, and thin tag archives. It is a problem on pages that should rank. If many important URLs are affected, check the site-wide CMS setting first.

Do not also block noindexed pages in robots.txt: a crawler that cannot fetch the page never sees the noindex. Remove noindex pages from the XML sitemap; see Non-indexable URL in XML sitemap.

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.