Issue library · 4 indexing checks
Confirm which URL should be indexed and remove conflicting directives.
An indexable page needs consistent signals about whether it may appear in search and which URL is preferred. Canonical and robots directives should support the same decision.
A strong page cannot rank if it is intentionally or accidentally excluded. Conflicting canonicals and robots directives also make consolidation and debugging harder.
The page has no canonical or declares another URL as preferred.
Add a self-reference for the preferred version, or confirm intentional consolidation to an equivalent indexable destination.
Check the rendered canonical and the destination’s status, content, and indexability.
More than one canonical prevents the page from declaring one clear preferred URL.
Remove competing header, plugin, or template output and keep one canonical.
Inspect the rendered head and confirm one canonical remains.
A robots or Googlebot directive asks search engines not to index the page.
Keep noindex only when exclusion is intentional; otherwise remove it from both HTML and headers.
Recheck the rendered directive and use URL Inspection after deployment.
General robots and Googlebot-specific instructions disagree.
Choose one deliberate indexing policy and make HTML meta tags and HTTP headers consistent.
Inspect all crawler-specific tags and the X-Robots-Tag response header.