Robots meta tag
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> in the page's HTML, often from a builder's "hide from search" setting.
Indexing // free
Free noindex checker
Paste any page address to see whether it tells search engines to leave it out: the robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header, robots.txt and the canonical tag, in one check.
Clunky Watch
Sites break quietly: a renewal fails, a setting changes, a robots.txt rule ships by mistake. Watch checks your homepage on a daily schedule and emails you when something breaks. £19 a year.
Where noindex hides
Four ways a page gets left out of search
X-Robots-Tag header
The same instruction sent by the server, which you cannot see in the page source.
robots.txt
A Disallow rule stops crawlers reading the page at all, so they cannot see its content or a noindex.
Canonical tag
A canonical pointing at another address asks search engines to list that address instead.
FAQ
Questions people ask
More free checks:
What does noindex mean?
noindex is an instruction, in a robots meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, that tells search engines not to list a page. Google and Bing follow it, so a page with noindex will drop out of their results once it is recrawled.
Why is my site set to noindex?
Usually by accident: a "hide from search engines" or "discourage search engines" setting in a site builder or WordPress, a staging setting copied to the live site, or a host that adds noindex to preview addresses.
Is blocking a page in robots.txt the same as noindex?
No. robots.txt stops crawlers reading a page, so they cannot see a noindex on it, and the address can still be listed without a description. To keep a page out of search, allow crawling and use noindex.
My page has no noindex but is not on Google. Why?
It may be new, thin, a near duplicate of another page, or not linked from anywhere Google crawls. Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool shows Google's own view of the page.