Noindex Tag Checker

What does noindex do?

Noindex tells search engines not to show a page in their results. It can be set in the HTML, with <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, or in the response headers, with X-Robots-Tag: noindex. Either one is enough, and when the two disagree the more restrictive wins.

It is the right tool for pages that should exist but not be found through search: thank-you pages, internal search results, staging copies, thin tag archives. On a page you want to rank it is a serious fault, and an easy one to miss because nothing looks wrong in the browser.

Noindex and robots.txt are not the same

robots.txt stops a crawler from fetching a page. Noindex stops a fetched page from being listed. They do not combine well: if robots.txt blocks a URL, the crawler never downloads it and so never sees the noindex. The URL can then stay in results as a bare link. To remove a page from search, allow crawling and set noindex.

Being indexable also needs a 200 status and, ideally, a canonical tag that names the page itself. This tool checks all of these together. To inspect the header alone, including on PDFs and images, use the X-Robots-Tag Checker.

How to use the Noindex Tag Checker

1. Enter the address of the page you want to check. You can leave out https://.
2. Press Check indexability. The page is fetched from our servers, the way a search engine crawler would fetch it.
3. Read the findings from top to bottom: problems first, then warnings. Each one says what to change.

Common problems and how to fix them