Indexability and crawling
How to fix a page that is both canonical and noindexed
Some pages say two contradictory things at once: this is the definitive version of this content, and also, do not index it. The usual result is that the page, and anything canonicalised to it, both drop out of search.
What it is, and what it costs
A self-referencing canonical says "index this URL as the original," while a noindex tag says "keep it out." Google cannot honour both. It often resolves the conflict by dropping the page, and any page pointing its canonical here can go with it.
How to fix it
Decide what you want. If the page should rank, remove the noindex. If it should stay out of search, remove the self-canonical too, so you are not also telling Google it is the original.
How to check your site
Crawl the site and flag pages that carry a self-canonical and a noindex together.
Questions people ask
- How does this even happen?
- Usually a plugin adds a self-canonical to every page while a separate setting noindexes a section, neither aware of the other.
Does your site have this?
Check your site for pages sending Google contradictory indexing signals.
See also
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.
- How to fix XML sitemap problemsA sitemap is how search engines discover pages your own links do not lead to well, and how they learn something changed. Two things go wrong with it: there is not one, or the one you have lists URLs that do not work.
- How to fix a page accidentally set to “noindex”If a page you care about is nowhere in Google, not even when you search its exact title, a noindex tag is the first thing to rule out. It is one line, it overrides everything else you do for that page, and it usually got there by accident.
- How to fix a robots.txt that blocks your whole siteDisallow: / in your robots.txt is the fastest way to disappear from search. It asks every crawler to skip the whole site at once, and it is a common leftover from launch day.