Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'

    Technical SEO
    4
    6
    1955
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • d.bird
      d.bird Subscriber last edited by

      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...?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Paul-IW
        Paul-IW @effectdigital last edited by

        @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?

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • d.bird
          d.bird Subscriber @jasongmcmahon last edited by

          Thanks, I'll take a look

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • d.bird
            d.bird Subscriber @effectdigital last edited by

            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!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • jasongmcmahon
              jasongmcmahon last edited by

              Hi there, check that caching isn; the issues at server & CMS levels. Other than that reindex the page via GSC

              d.bird 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • effectdigital
                effectdigital last edited by

                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:

                • https://d.pr/i/RAYzE4.png

                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:

                • https://d.pr/f/1ZKNfF.php

                ... we can see, there are no problems here either:

                • https://d.pr/i/kcxO0z.png

                Wow - that's really unhelpful! 😧

                Let's see what happens if we specifically search Google's live index for the URL:

                • https://d.pr/i/944xFl.png

                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?

                • https://d.pr/i/dvbCfy.png

                Nope - that's fine too! No problems there...

                Could the robots.txt file be interfering?

                • https://d.pr/i/DmAN1t.png

                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:

                • https://d.pr/i/cy0MoW.png

                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...

                • https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk%2Fbad-credit-mortgages%2Fhow-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit%2F&tab=desktop

                Nothing useful still!

                Google's mobile friendly tool gives us some, semi-interesting information:

                • https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly?view=fetch-info&id=g4uSC2GcoipwxKk-PtqN2Q

                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):

                • https://d.pr/i/Iyrzq5.png

                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

                d.bird Paul-IW 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 2
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Tom3_15

                  Google is indexing bad URLS

                  Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!

                  Technical SEO | | Tom3_15
                  0
                • nlogix

                  How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.

                  Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are  getting indexed in Google.

                  Technical SEO | | nlogix
                  0
                • netzkern_AG

                  Does Google index internal anchors as separate pages?

                  Hi, Back in September, I added a function that sets an anchor on each subheading (h[2-6]) and creates a Table of content that links to each of those anchors. These anchors did show up in the SERPs as JumpTo Links. Fine. Back then I also changed the canonicals to a slightly different structur and meanwhile there was some massive increase in the number of indexed pages - WAY over the top - which has since been fixed by removing (410) a complete section of the site. However ... there are still ~34.000 pages indexed to what really are more like 4.000 plus (all properly canonicalised). Naturally I am wondering, what google thinks it is indexing. The number is just way of and quite inexplainable. So I was wondering: Does Google save JumpTo links as unique pages? Also, does anybody know any method of actually getting all the pages in the google index? (Not actually existing sites via Screaming Frog etc, but actual pages in the index - all methods I found sadly do not work.) Finally: Does somebody have any other explanation for the incongruency in indexed vs. actual pages? Thanks for your replies! Nico

                  Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG
                  0
                • tgwebmaster

                  Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?

                  I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing?  Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?

                  Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster
                  0
                • mshowells

                  Fake Links indexing in google

                  Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)

                  Technical SEO | | mshowells
                  0
                • rikmon

                  De-indexed from Google

                  Hi Search Experts! We are just launching a new site for a client with a completely new URL.  The client can not provide any access details for their existing site.  Any ideas how can we get the existing site de-indexed from Google? Thanks guys!

                  Technical SEO | | rikmon
                  0
                • UnderRugSwept

                  Google is indexing my directories

                  I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was looking at all of Google's results for my site and I found dozens of results for directories such as: Index of /scouting/blog/wp-includes/js/swfupload/plugins Obviously I don't want those indexed. How do I prevent Google from indexing those? Also, it only seems to be doing it with Wordpress, not any of the directories on my main site. (We have a wordpress blog, which is only a portion of the site)

                  Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
                  0
                • reallyitsme

                  Adding 'NoIndex Meta' to Prestashop Module & Search pages.

                  Hi Looking for a fix for the PrestaShop platform Look for the definitive answer on how to best stop the indexing of PrestaShop modules such as "send to a friend", "Best Sellers" and site search pages. We want to be able to add a meta noindex ()to pages ending in: /search?tag=ball&p=15 or /modules/sendtoafriend/sendtoafriend-form.php We already have in the robot text: Disallow: /search.php
                  Disallow: /modules/ (Google seems to ignore these) But as a further tool we would like to incude the noindex to all these pages too to stop duplicated pages. I assume this needs to be in either the head.tpl or the .php file of each PrestaShop module.? Or is there a general site wide code fix to put in the metadata to apply' Noindex Meta' to certain files. Current meta code here: Please reply with where to add code and what the code should be. Thanks in advance.

                  Technical SEO | | reallyitsme
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.