Page set to noindex
A page can instruct search engines to leave it out of search results entirely. Sometimes that is deliberate, but on a public page it means no one will ever find it through search, so Silktide reports these pages for you to confirm.
A directive is set with a robots meta tag in the page's , or with an X-Robots-Tag response header:
<!-- This page will never appear in search results -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Legitimate uses include thank-you pages, internal tools, and duplicate content you do not want indexed. The danger is the accidental case: a checkbox or a staging-site setting left on after launch.
Why this matters
An accidental noindex is silent. The page loads normally, looks fine to every visitor, and passes every other test - it is simply invisible in Google and other search engines. Sites have lost months of search traffic to a single leftover noindex before anyone noticed.
Because the directive is sometimes intentional, Silktide raises this as a warning to confirm rather than an error to fix.
How to fix it
Decide whether the page should appear in search:
- If yes, remove the noindex directive. Check the robots meta tag, the
X-Robots-Tagresponse header, and your CMS's per-page visibility or "discourage search engines" settings. Also look for anonedirective, which implies noindex. - If no - the page is deliberately hidden - the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Find pages whose only reason for being excluded from search is a noindex directive. Pages that are unindexable for other reasons (behind a login, returning an error, and so on) are not flagged.
- Skip pages that are also listed in your - listing a page for indexing while marking it noindex is a direct contradiction, reported with higher severity by Sitemap page set to noindex.
- Flag each remaining noindex page for review.