Last Updated on September 13, 2022
So you’ve noindexed a page…
…and Google told you about it.
Who cares right?
Well that’s all fine, as long as you did it on purpose.
Let’s briefly go over why this may be a problem.
Why is this a problem?
The “noindex” robots meta tag tells Google to “not index” this web page.
To appear in a Google search result, your page has to be crawled and indexed by the Googlebot.
So if you have set a page to “noindex” it will not appear in any Google searches.
This is fine if it’s a useless page that has no SEO value, but if it’s an important page, then you could be missing out on traffic.
How to fix it?
Fixing this problem involves changing the meta tag from “noindex” to “index”.
How you do this will depend on your CMS.
In WordPress for example, you may have a plugin called Yoast, which offers you both page level settings, and sitewide settings to noindex certain types of content.
In other ecommerce platforms such as Shopify or Opencart, you will most likely have a 3rd party extension that is adding the tag, or it has been hardcoded.
After you have removed the tag and cleared any cache, resubmit the url to Google through the URL inspection tool.
Need help?
If you’re struggling with fixing this issue, or anything else related to SEO, then I can help you.
I have a strong record of increasing rankings with modern SEO techniques that make a real difference to your business.
View my services here, or email me for more information at info@matt-jackson.com
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Heyy i have a issue on my website that my web pages are not index in Google by noindex tag
My site hosted in blogger.
Soo how i fix them.?
Hi Vicky, please email me the urls that aren’t indexed and I’ll take a look: info@matt-jackson.com
I USED YOAST SEO,MY LOTS OF URLS EXCLUDED ,BY NO INDEX TAG
HELP ME PLZ
Hi Nagendra,
There is a Yoast setting under the “Search Apperance” section where you control the indexing of pages.
Usually this is a good thing, unless you want to rank your post category or tag pages.
If you email me more info then I can take a look: info@matt-jackson.com
sir i made my website 20 days ago and its not index on google search console why sir.
It can be for a long list of reasons Usman, feel free to email me the site and I can take a look.
My 10 pages are showing no-index tags in google search console. I have checked all the settings in yoast seo and cleared all the cache and manually looked into the webpages and there is no ‘noindex’ tags in the webpages but still problem persisits .
Google has been very slow to respond to tags/canonical changes on low authority/low traffic websites for a few months now. You can try manually submitting the pages in GSC but it may simply take more time.
Bonjour,
j’ai un problème sur mon site Web, certains URL de mes pages ne sont pas indexés par Googles par la balise noindex (Google Search Console)
Exepmle d’URL affecté: digimarket5.com/tag/le-drop-shipping/
Mon site est édité avec WordPress, et j’utilise le Pluggin SEOPress.
Merci de m’aider pour régler ce problème, pour info, je ne m’y connait pas dans la programmation.
Cordialement
Hi Mkhatori,
You can usually control this in WordPress with Yoast or RankMath (standard SEO plugins).
In the Taxonomy section, you can set tags to be indexed or not indexed.
Thank you soo much, I searched many articles on the web, but only your blog post helped me. I actually disabled the indexing from the Yoast plugin by mistake. And your blog post gave me the hint to check that.
No problem Daljit.
I have a list of such urls which are present in this category, but those are not correct urls. I don’t know from where those urls comes. GWT is showing the issues for those urls. Those urls do not exist anywhere. So, please tell me how can I resolve this issue.
For ex:-
sendbestgift.com/send-cakes-to-faizabad-onl
sendbestgift.com/asd/
sendbestgift.com/cakes
sendbestgift.com/ihvsxjjm.html
Hi Deepak,
It looks like your server isn’t showing a proper 404 error code for non-existent URLs, and is instead showing a 200 status page with a noindex,nofollow meta tag instead.
This isn’t best practice, so I recommend fixing this so that URLs that don’t exist show a proper 404 status.
I got issue of noindex detected in robots meta tag. Can you help me out?
Hi Deepak,
Sure, email me with more information to info@matt-jackson.com
You have given very good information. And you also give quick replies to the comments of people and also help in solving their problems, I liked reading this.