Find out how to audit your brand for AI search visibility in July’s webinar with Lily Grozeva. Audit your brand for AI search visibility - Lily Grozeva. Sign up now!
Find out how to audit your brand for AI search visibility in July’s webinar with Lily Grozeva. Audit your brand for AI search visibility - Lily Grozeva. Sign up now!
This means that the URL in question is noindex, yet received organic search traffic, per the connected Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts.
If a URL is noindex then a specific instruction has been given to search engines to NOT index the page. Yet since URLs need to be indexed in order to receive organic search traffic, this implies that search engines may be ignoring the robots directive.
This Hint will trigger for any internal URL that is noindex, but which recorded some clicks in Search Analytics, and/or some visits in Google Analytics.
This data was collected from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, via API, for the connected Property/View, and for the specified date range.
Consider the URL: https://example.com/page-a, which has registered some search traffic.
The Hint would trigger for this URL if it had a noindex in either the <head> or the HTTP header (or both):
Meta noindex in the <head>,
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>example</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
...
</head>
<body>...</body>
</html>OR in the HTTP header:
HTTP/... 200 OK
...
X-Robots-Tag: noindexBefore jumping to any conclusions, it is worth remembering that the traffic data collected is historical, yet the crawl was done in real time - so it might be the case that this URL used to be indexable, and is now noindex.
Assuming this is not the case, then you would need to understand why a noindex URL is appearing in the search index (which it must do to get traffic), when the deliberate instruction is for it to not be indexed.
There might be a number of reasons why a noindex URL is still in the index:
Typically, Google is very good at removing noindex URLs from the index, but if any of the factors above are in play, this may cause it to be delayed.
Sitebulb Desktop
Find, fix and communicate technical issues with easy visuals, in-depth insights, & prioritized recommendations across 300+ SEO issues.
Sitebulb CloudGet all the capability of Sitebulb Desktop, accessible via your web browser. Crawl at scale without project, crawl credit, or machine limits.