Noindex Checker

How the directives combine

none means noindex, nofollow. When several directives apply, from the generic robots meta tag, a crawler-specific tag such as googlebot, and the X-Robots-Tag header, search engines apply the most restrictive combination. The header is the only way to set noindex on files that have no HTML head, such as PDFs and images.

A noindex takes effect only when the page is crawled again, so a page can stay in results for days or weeks after the tag is added.

The staging-site accident

A development or staging site is usually kept out of search with noindex, and when the site goes live the tag sometimes goes with it, quietly removing the whole site from results. After every launch or theme change, run this check on the home page and a sample of templates.

Do not combine noindex with a canonical pointing to another page: one says drop this page, the other says treat it as a copy of that one. Check the canonical with the canonical checker.

How to use it

1. Enter a public page URL.
2. Choose Check indexability.
3. Review page-level and header-level directives.

Privacy & limitations

The page is fetched through TOEA’s API and not stored. An indexable result does not guarantee that a search engine will index the page.