Noindex Checker - Is Your Page Blocked From Google? | Hawk Academy
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Free Tool · Indexability check

Noindex Checker

A page gets blocked from Google in four different places, and most checkers only look at one of them. Paste a page address and see all four, plus the mistake that quietly keeps pages in search when you meant to remove them.

Fetches the page and your public robots.txt, nothing else. No login, nothing stored. A free tool from Hawk Academy.

The four places a page gets blocked

Most noindex checkers read the meta tag and stop. That misses three of the four ways a page ends up out of Google, and two of them are invisible when you view the page source.

  1. robots.txt. Decides whether Googlebot is allowed to fetch the address at all. This is about crawling, not indexing, and the difference matters more than almost anything else on this page.
  2. The meta robots tag. The one everybody knows. We read the robots tag and the googlebot variant, and only inside the head, so the word noindex sitting in your body copy is not mistaken for a directive.
  3. The X-Robots-Tag header. A noindex sent by your server or CDN rather than written in the HTML. It does not appear in view-source, which is exactly why it catches people out. We read it, including when it is scoped to a single bot.
  4. The canonical. If the page nominates a different address as the real one, this address is not the one that gets indexed.

We also report the HTTP status, because nothing gets indexed until the page returns 200.

The noindex Google can never see

This is the one worth knowing, and it is why the tool reads robots.txt as well as the tag.

If you put a noindex on a page and block that page in robots.txt, the noindex does not work. Google is not allowed to fetch the page, so it never reads the directive telling it to stay away. The address can still turn up in search results, usually with no description under it. Search Console calls this Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt.

The fix runs the opposite way to instinct. To get a page out of Google you have to let Google in: allow crawling so the noindex can actually be read, and once the page has dropped out you can block it again if you want.

When this tool finds both at once it says so directly rather than listing two separate problems, because the two fixes contradict each other and doing the obvious one makes it worse.

This checks Google. For AI, use these

This tool answers whether Googlebot can index a page. Whether an AI system can read and cite it is a different question with different answers: