little think: your site might be invisible right now

Nobody has ever asked me what my favourite part of technical SEO is. If anyone was cool and groovy enough to enquire, I’d have a hard time deciding between site migrations and the noindex tag. This post is about the latter, thanks for asking.

To make sure we’re on the same page: a noindex tag is a single line of code on a webpage that tells search engines “don’t show this to anyone”. That’s right, all it takes is <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> and that page won’t appear in traditional SERPs (AI/LLM retrieval and citation is a whole other blog post, watch this space).

If SEO is the Avengers, then noindex is Thanos snapping his fingers. All your efforts rendered futile with one simple action.

You’d imagine that with this great power comes great responsibility. The ability to block pages, even entire sites, from appearing on Google is a power only the worthy should possess. But instead it’s often made far too accessible inside a CMS: a simple toggle to plunge a page into PageRank purgatory.

The real issue is that unless you know where to look, or have a tool to help you find them, noindex tags can go unnoticed for a very long time. There’s an irony that the people in closest proximity to the problem are usually the least likely to notice, as they visit the site directly from a bookmark or browser history, not via the SERPs.

In my time working in technical SEO, the most common reason for a rogue noindex tag is that it was applied to the page or site whilst it was being built, so nothing was indexed until it was ready. The intention was nice, but there are better ways to keep things under wraps during a build. When the page or site finally goes live, unless there’s a decent SEO person involved, the noindex tag often remains in place, forgotten about in all the excitement.

On the positive side, the page is still visible to users visiting your site (assuming you’ve linked to it properly), so it’s not like the content isn’t there. It’s just doing nothing for your rankings or visibility.

what happens when google finds a noindex directive?

Google will typically crawl a page a few times to confirm a noindex directive is permanent, then reduce its crawl frequency significantly rather than waste crawl budget on it. It will still recrawl periodically to check whether anything has changed, but at a heavily reduced rate.

Long-term, Google treats the links on that page as though they were nofollowed, so it stops passing internal PageRank through it. Google has also indicated that noindexed content isn’t weighed when it assesses a site’s overall quality and helpfulness, which cuts both ways: the page can’t drag you down, but it can’t hold you up either.

are there good reasons to set pages to noindex?

Yes, enough to warrant a guide. Lucky for you, I’ve already written it: when to use noindex.

how can i check if my page has a noindex tag?

I hear you. It would be great if somebody had created a tool that let you check for issues affecting a page’s indexability. It just so happens I’ve made an indexability checker where all you have to do is pop in your URL and it checks for noindex tags and other blockers.

what happens after i remove a noindex tag?

If you’ve found and fixed a noindex issue, don’t wait for Google to pick it up, request indexing in Google Search Console. It’ll check the page for any immediate blockers, then add it to a priority crawl queue. Inspect the URL again the next day to check it’s worked. There’s no exact timeline, but it should tell you if there’s a hiccup.

If you’re still having problems, take a gander at why isn’t my page indexed?.

If the page in question has carried the noindex tag since launch, Google will effectively treat it as a newly discovered URL with zero historical ranking signals. It’ll re-calculate and flow internal and external link equity back to the URL, as well as assess it for quality, relevance, mobile-friendliness and all that good stuff.

If the page had only carried the noindex tag temporarily and was well established beforehand, the impact depends on how long the tag was present. Google retains a historical page record in its database for an undisclosed grace period, so if the tag was found and removed quickly the page should recover quickly, but it’s worth monitoring for one to four weeks to make sure it stabilises.