Noindex & Indexability Checker
Check whether Google can index a page, and which Search Console status each problem shows up as
In 30 seconds
- A noindex can sit in the HTML (a robots meta tag) or in the response headers (X-Robots-Tag). Check both.
- robots.txt stops crawling, not indexing. Google can’t see a noindex on a page it isn’t allowed to fetch.
- Everything here is visible from outside. Whether Google chooses to index a page it can reach is only in Search Console.
What the checker looks at
Enter a URL and the checker loads it the way a crawler does, following every redirect by hand. It then checks everything that can keep the page out of Google’s index:
- HTTP status: 4xx and 5xx pages aren’t indexed, and slow servers get crawled less.
- Redirects: each hop, whether it’s permanent or temporary, and loops or chains that break.
- noindex in a robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header.
- robots.txt: whether Googlebot is allowed to fetch the URL.
- Canonical: whether the page names a different URL as the one to index, and whether that URL works.
- Soft 404 signs: error-page wording, and how the site answers an address that doesn’t exist.
- Content: whether the main text is in the HTML or only appears after JavaScript runs.
- Sitemap: whether the URL is listed in the site’s XML sitemap.
Every problem is matched to the status it shows up as in Search Console’s Page indexing report, with a link to the guide for that status.
Where a noindex hides
The usual place is a meta tag in the page’s <head>:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />The same instruction can come from the server as a response header, which you won’t see in the page source. Frameworks, CDNs and staging setups add it this way:
X-Robots-Tag: noindexWatch out
A Noindex: line in robots.txt does nothing. Google stopped supporting it in 2019. And blocking a page in robots.txt while it carries a noindex backfires: Google can’t fetch the page, so it never sees the noindex, and the URL can still be indexed from links to it.
Reading the result
A Problem stops the page being indexed outright: an error status, a noindex, a robots.txt block or a broken redirect. A Check is something that often keeps a page out, like a canonical pointing elsewhere or very little content, but may be on purpose.
Quick fix
If every check passes and Search Console still says the page isn’t indexed, the blocker isn’t technical. Google reached the page and decided against it, which is “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed”. Those come down to how useful the page is and how well it’s linked, not to tags.