The page asks search engines not to index it

Updated 2026-10-01

HighConfirmedQuick winseo.indexability.noindex

What this check looks for

This page carries a noindex directive, which tells search engines to leave it out of their results entirely. If that is deliberate, nothing here needs doing. If it is not, the page cannot appear in search at all.

Why it matters

A noindex directive is absolute: no amount of content, links or performance work will make the page appear in results while it is there. It is also the single most common cause of a page that 'will not rank' — usually a staging setting that shipped to production.

When the check passes, your report says: “The page is open to being indexed by search engines”.

What it costs your score

When this check fails it removes 35 points from your SEO score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. SEO carries a weight of 5 in the overall score.

It shares the seo.indexability family ceiling of 45 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from SEO. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.

Severity: high
Default confidence: confirmed
Status when triggered: fail
Deduction: 35 points
Family cap: seo.indexability · 45
Category: SEO
Module: Seo audit
Fix owned by: user
In the ruleset since: 2026.09

How the whole score is calculated

How to fix it

Remove the noindex directive, unless this page is meant to be excluded.

While it is present the page cannot appear in search results at all, regardless of anything else on it.

Decide first whether exclusion is intended. Staging sites, checkout steps and duplicate filtered views are legitimately excluded.
If it is not intended, find the source. Check the page source for <meta name="robots">, and the response headers for X-Robots-Tag.
In WordPress, check Settings → Reading → 'Discourage search engines from indexing this site', and your SEO plugin's per-page setting.
For an X-Robots-Tag, the rule is in the web server, the CDN or the application — not in the page — so search the server configuration rather than the template.
Once removed, request indexing in Google Search Console rather than waiting for the next natural crawl.

How to confirm it worked

curl -sSI ‹url› | grep -i x-robots-tag — should return nothing, or a value without "noindex"
curl -sS ‹url› | grep -iE 'name="(robots|googlebot)"' — should return nothing, or a value without "noindex". We read both names, and none counts as noindex

A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.

Remediation by platform

Page HTML

<!-- Remove the tag entirely, or state the positive explicitly. -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

nginx

# Find the rule that is adding it, rather than adding a rule that removes it.
#   grep -r 'X-Robots-Tag' /etc/nginx/
# If it is added by an upstream or a CDN, fix it there — a header set here can be
# overwritten downstream, and you will be debugging two rules instead of one.

index, follow is the default, so the tag can simply be deleted. Stating it explicitly is only useful when something else in the stack might add the opposite.
add_header in a nested block silently discards the headers from the enclosing block, which is how an X-Robots-Tag often survives an apparent removal.

Technical detail

The directive was found in ‹source›, with the value ‹value›.

noindex is honoured by Google, Bing and every major crawler, and it is honoured wherever it appears: a <meta name="robots"> tag, a <meta name="googlebot"> tag, or an X-Robots-Tag response header. none is shorthand for noindex, nofollow and has the same effect. A page can carry the directive in one channel and not the other, so check both.

**If this is intentional** — a thank-you page, a filtered listing, a staging host — this finding needs no action, and dotvitals cannot tell the difference from the outside. What it can tell you is that the directive is there, which is worth confirming.

**If it is not intentional**, the usual sources are: a content management system's 'discourage search engines' setting, a noindex left on after a site launch, a server or CDN rule adding X-Robots-Tag to a whole path, or a plugin that adds it to a page type. Removing the directive is not instant — the page has to be recrawled before it returns to the index.

Standards and references

Test this on your domain

Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.

Open the seo audit checker