When a page does not show up in Google, the cause is usually technical and fixable in minutes. Work through this checklist from top to bottom. The first items are the most common and the most damaging.

1. Is there a noindex?

A noindex tells search engines not to show the page in results. It can be set in two places:

In the HTML: <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
In an HTTP response header: X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Common causes: a staging setting copied to production, WordPress's Discourage search engines from indexing this site option, an SEO plugin setting, or a framework default for preview deployments.

2. Does robots.txt block the page?

Open https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A rule like this blocks everything:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Remember that robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. If you block a page in robots.txt, Google cannot see its noindex tag, and the URL may still appear in results without a description. To remove a page from results, allow crawling and use noindex.

3. Does the canonical tag point somewhere else?

<link rel="canonical" href="…"> tells Google which URL is the main version. If it points to another page, Google indexes that one instead. If it points to another domain, often a staging or old domain, your page may never be indexed.

4. Does the page return 200?

Redirect chains, soft 404s (an error page returning 200), and 5xx errors all prevent indexing. Check the final status code, not only what the browser shows.

5. Can Google find the page?

New pages need to be discovered. Add them to your XML sitemap, reference the sitemap in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, and link to the page from other indexed pages.

6. Is the content worth indexing?

If all the technical checks pass, Google may have chosen not to index the page because it looks thin or duplicate. Search Console shows this as "Crawled - currently not indexed".

Automate the checklist

The free noindex checker runs the technical checks above on your homepage and up to 24 more pages. Add your site to Wardzo to have it re-checked every week, so a bad deploy cannot quietly de-index you.

Noindex and indexability checker

Free indexability checker. Find accidental noindex tags and X-Robots-Tag headers, robots.txt rules that block Google, missing sitemaps, off-site canonicals and broken pages.

What does noindex mean?

Noindex is a directive in a robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header that tells search engines not to show a page in search results.

What is robots.txt?

robots.txt is a text file at the root of a website that tells crawlers, including search engines and AI crawlers, which paths they may fetch.

Why is my page not indexed? A noindex and robots.txt checklist