Free tool
Noindex Checker
Whether a page is set to noindex, checking the header and the meta tag both.
How it works
What is the Noindex Checker?
The Noindex Checker is a free tool that tells you whether a page asks search engines not to index it. It fetches the URL and checks both places a noindex can live, the <meta name="robots"> tag in the HTML and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, then reports the page as indexable or not and names which signal it found.
How to use the Noindex Checker
- Paste the full URL of the page you want to check. The tool reads that exact page and follows any redirects to the final one.
- Press Check noindex.
- Read the verdict: Page is Indexable, or Page is Not Indexable.
- Check the two lines under it, Noindex in HTML meta tag and Noindex in HTTP headers, to see which one to fix.
How do you check if a page is noindex?
Check two places: the robots meta tag in the page's HTML and the X-Robots-Tag response header. Either one keeps the page out of the index, and Google and Bing honour both.
The header does not appear in view-source or in most CMS screens, which is why an accidental noindex so often lives there: a staging setting that reached production, or a CDN or proxy rule copied from another site. This checker reports each signal separately, so a page with clean HTML still fails when the header is the problem.
Why is my page not indexed when it has no noindex?
Because noindex is only one reason a page stays out of the index. A robots.txt rule can stop the page being crawled, a canonical tag can point search engines to another URL, and a page that returns an error status is not indexed at all.
Check the rules with the Robots.txt Checker and the canonical with the Canonical Tag Scanner. For Google's own view of a URL, including whether it has been crawled yet, use URL Inspection in Search Console.
Does noindex work if robots.txt blocks the page?
No. If robots.txt disallows a URL, the crawler never fetches the page, so it never reads the noindex. The URL can stay in the index as a bare link with no description.
To remove a page, allow crawling, serve the noindex, wait for the page to be crawled again, and only then block it in robots.txt if you still need to.
Questions
- What does noindex mean?
- Noindex is a directive that tells search engines not to show a page in their results. The crawler can still fetch the page and follow its links, but the URL is dropped from the index once the directive has been read.
- How long does noindex take to work?
- Noindex takes effect the next time a search engine crawls the page, which depends on how often that URL is crawled. In Google Search Console, requesting indexing through URL Inspection prompts a fresh crawl, so the directive is read sooner.
- What is the difference between noindex and nofollow?
- Noindex keeps a page out of search results, while nofollow tells search engines not to follow the links on it.
noindex, followremoves the page but lets its links be crawled, though Google has said it eventually treats a long-term noindexed page's links as nofollow. - Should I use noindex or robots.txt?
- Use noindex to keep a page out of search results and robots.txt to stop it being crawled. robots.txt does not remove a page from the index, and a page it blocks can never have its noindex read.
- What is the X-Robots-Tag header?
- The
X-Robots-Tagis an HTTP response header that carries the same directives as the robots meta tag, such asnoindex. It also works for files with no HTML, like PDFs, and you can see it withcurl -sI https://example.com/page. - How do I noindex a page in WordPress?
- In WordPress, an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math adds a setting on each page to hide it from search results, which writes the noindex meta tag. Also check Settings, then Reading: Discourage search engines from indexing this site applies noindex to the whole site.
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