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Technical SEO

What Is Noindex?

Noindex is a robots meta tag directive (meta name="robots" content="noindex") that tells search engines not to include a specific page in their search index. The page can still be crawled, but it will not appear in search results.

Why Noindex matters for SEO

Accidentally noindexing important pages is one of the most common and damaging SEO mistakes, especially after site migrations when staging noindex tags are left on production pages. A single misplaced noindex tag can remove a high-traffic page from search results entirely.

Pro tip on Noindex

Audit all pages for unintentional noindex tags. Check that staging environments use noindex but production does not. Verify via Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool. Never combine noindex with a canonical tag (conflicting signals).

Related terms

Canonical TagDon't use noindex and canonical together; they send conflicting signalsRobots.txtrobots.txt blocks crawling; noindex blocks indexing. Different functionsIndexationNoindex is the most direct way to prevent a page from being indexed

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Free Meta Tag Checker

Check noindex on your site

HTTP Header CheckerRead every response header a URL returns, with the redirect chain timed hop by hop and X-Robots-Tag, header canonicals and caching gaps called out.Page Indexability CheckerFind out why a page is not indexed. Checks status codes, noindex tags and X-Robots-Tag headers, robots.txt rules, canonicals, sitemap membership, and rendered content.XML Sitemap ValidatorTest any XML sitemap against the sitemaps.org protocol. Catches namespace errors, bad lastmod dates, size limits, and cross-domain URLs.

Accidentally noindexed pages are invisible in search. CrawlRaven flags every noindex tag on your site so nothing important gets hidden.

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