Noindex on an important page: what it is and how to fix it
What it is
A page tells search engines to hide it from results.
Why it matters to a client
A “noindex” instruction removes the page from search results completely. On a service or product page that is lost revenue, and it is usually left over from a staging site.
How to find it
Run an AuditOpti free audit, or crawl the site with any crawler and filter the results by status code. In Google Search Console, the Pages report under Indexing lists the same problems from Google's side.
How to fix it
Remove the noindex tag from any page that should be found. In WordPress this is usually one checkbox in the SEO plugin or in Settings → Reading.
- 1Check Settings → Reading and make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is unticked. This is the single most common cause after a site launch.
- 2In the SEO plugin, open the page and set the indexing option back to “Index”.
- 3If a whole post type is affected, change it in the plugin's Content Types settings.
- 4Request indexing for the most important URLs in Google Search Console once fixed.
How AuditOpti prioritizes it
AuditOpti scores this as critical severity by default, then multiplies it by how many pages are affected — one page is not the same problem as a hundred. After that, the AI re-ranks it against everything else on the site by likely business impact, so a critical-severity problem on a service page can outrank a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Check a site for this
Run a free audit and we'll tell you whether this issue is present — along with everything else worth fixing.