Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
-
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results.
Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/
Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page.
I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed.
Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
-
@effectdigital and @jasongmcmahon did you ever get to the bottom of this and if so what caused it and what was the long term fix, as GSC and Google seem to behaving in a peculiar way?
We had a similar issue with this page: https://www.simplyadverse.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgage, but after several cache clears and re-indexing/fix requests it indexed fine.
We now have a page on another similar site that is stubbornly refusing to index. Its a new site and other than the a simple domain homepage, all pages when under development had "noindex " on them.
Several pages on the site on launch behaved like this with GSC saying the page was marked as "noindex" but submitted in the sitemap, but when you check to see if indexing was possible GSC says its fine (we'd removed noindex and setup the sitemap) . All crawling tools say its fine, but this page wont index despite repeated attempts over a couple of weeks, all other pages are now fine, but this page won't index: https://simplysl.co.uk/buy-to-let/
Other than they're all mortgage related sites/pages, I can't fathom why one page would be troublesome and all others index OK despite having the same setup and indexing process, any ideas?
-
Thanks, I'll take a look
-
Thanks for going into so much detail, much appreciated.
We've asked Google to reindex it and 'validate the fix', even though we can't find anything to fix!
-
Hi there, check that caching isn; the issues at server & CMS levels. Other than that reindex the page via GSC
-
This is really weird. Really really weird!
As you say, your site's source code seems to confirm that it is set to index. If we look here, we can plainly see that the coding syntax for a no-index directive is "noindex" (all one word).
Let's look at your source code:
Yep, everything seems fine there! But what if a script is modifying your source code and including the directive - and Google's picking up on that?
If we look at the modified source code which I rendered and saved to a file here:
... we can see, there are no problems here either:
Wow - that's really unhelpful!
Let's see what happens if we specifically search Google's live index for the URL:
Interestingly, when we search Google's index for this page, we get this page returned instead.
It makes sense that Google would return that URL if it couldn't return the main URL, as one is nested inside of the other. If everything was healthy, we'd see Google listing both URLs instead of just one of them. Even if you edit my index query to remove the trailing slash, you still only get the nested URL (not the one you want to be showing, which is at a slightly higher-up level)
Another thought I had was, hmm maybe this is a canonical tag gone rogue. That bore no fruit either, as this page (which you want to index, yet won't) canonicals to this page - and both of those URLs are exactly the same. As such, it's obvious that we can't blame the canonical tag either! I even viewed the modified source to see if it got altered, no dice (the canonical tag is just fine)
Maybe the XML file is telling Google not to index the URL?
Nope - that's fine too! No problems there...
Could the robots.txt file be interfering?
No! Darn it, that's not the problem
I know that a no-index or blocking directive can also be sent through the HTTP header (usually via X-robots). Let's check the response header of your URL out:
Nothing there that really raises my eyebrow. This is enabled and set to block, but to be honest that shouldn't affect Google's crawling at all. Anyone correct me if I am wrong, but defending your site against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks doesn't impede crawling right?
Fudge it. Let's fling it through Google's Page-Speed Insights tool. Usually that will tell you if something is being blocked and why...
Nothing useful still!
Google's mobile friendly tool gives us some, semi-interesting information:
But it doesn't say the page can't be loaded. It only says some resources which the page pulls in can't be loaded! And guess what? They're all external things on other websites (other than a few theme related bits, but nothing IMO that should stop the whole page loading).
Let's try DeepCrawl's indexability checker (they make amazing software by the way... expensive though):
Sir... there is NO GOOD REASON why your URL shouldn't be indexed. I am 99.9% certain you have encountered a legit Google bug. Post about it here. Only Google can help you at this juncture
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Single page website vs Google
Hi, I was wondering on this issue: There is a website for guesthouse. It has all information on one page (it is a valid page, with legitimate content). How google treats those pages? Would it treat it as Doorway Page? Or give some other penalties? What about a bounce rate? Because it will be pretty high, as there is no option to go somewhere else? What is your opinion on single page websites - SEO wise? Is it a shot in the foot? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
Problems with to many indexed pages
A client of our have not been able to rank very well the last few years. They are a big brand in our country, have more than 100+ offline stores and have plenty of inbound links. Our main issue has been that they have to many indexed pages. Before we started we they had around 750.000 pages in the Google index. After a bit of work we got it down to 400-450.000. During our latest push we used the robots meta tag with "noindex, nofollow" on all pages we wanted to get out of the index, along with canonical to correct URL - nothing was done to robots.txt to block the crawlers from entering the pages we wanted out. Our aim is to get it down to roughly 5000+ pages. They just passed 5000 products + 100 categories. I added this about 10 days ago, but nothing has happened yet. Is there anything I can to do speed up the process of getting all the pages out of index? The page is vita.no if you want to have a look!
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
YouTube & Google + Pages
Hello, Has anyone had luck associating their Google + business page with their YouTube channel? Our YouTube page is associated with our Google + profile (and we would like it to be associated with the Google + business page.) There are numerous articles out there that Google is working on an update to allow the Channel/Google+ business page association but I am wondering if there is news we might have missed. Or if there is a way to get around it? We want to implement video on some site pages and would rather use YouTube code as opposed to customizing a solution. Do most folks think Google will have an easy solution once it at arrives? Meaning if you upload videos to your channel that is currently associated with the profile page, do you think there will be a way to convert everything over to a Google + business page once they unveil an update. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Noindex Pages indexed
I'm having problem that gogole is index my search results pages even though i have added the "noindex" metatag. Is the best thing to block the robot from crawling that file using robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Tedred0 -
Index page 404 error
Crawl Results show there is 404 error page which is index.htmk **it is under my root, ** http://mydomain.com/index.htmk I have checked my index page on the server and my index page is index.HTML instead of index.HTMK. Please help me to fix it
Technical SEO | | semer0 -
NoIndex/NoFollow pages showing up when doing a Google search using "Site:" parameter
We recently launched a beta version of our new website in a subdomain of our existing site. The existing site is www.fonts.com with the beta living at new.fonts.com. We do not want Google to crawl the new site until it's out of beta so we have added the following on all pages: However, one of our team members noticed that google is displaying results from new.fonts.com when doing an "site:new.fonts.com" search (see attached screenshot). Is it possible that Google is indexing the content despite the noindex, nofollow tags? We have double checked the syntax and it seems correct except the trailing "/". I know Google still crawls noindexed pages, however, the fact that they're showing up in search results using the site search syntax is unsettling. Any thoughts would be appreciated! DyWRP.png
Technical SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI0 -
Google refuses to index our domain. Any suggestions?
A very similar question was asked previously. (http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-google-did-not-index-our-domain) We've done everything in that post (and comments) and then some. The domain is http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/ and, so far, we have: put "User-agent: * Allow: /" in the robots.txt (We recently removed the "allow" line and included a Sitemap: directive instead.) built a few hundred links from various pages including multiple links from .gov domains properly set up everything in Webmaster Tools submitted site maps (multiple times) checked the "fetch as googlebot" display in Webmaster Tools (everything looks fine) submitted a "request re-consideration" note to Google asking why we're not being indexed Webmaster Tools tells us that it's crawling the site normally and is indexing everything correctly. Yahoo! and Bing have both indexed the site with no problems and are returning results. Additionally, many of the pages on the site have PR0 which is unusual for a non-indexed site. Typically we've seen those sites have no PR at all. If anyone has any ideas about what we could do I'm all ears. We've been working on this for about a month and cannot figure this thing out. Thanks in advance for your advice.
Technical SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0