Why is page still indexing?

[SSFCU]

Hi all,

I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that?

Thanks,
Sarah

[ecommercebc]

Hi Sarah,

It would definitely be strange for Google to continue showing the page in results after you've added noindex. By their own admission, even if this page has links pointing to it, it shouldn't appear in the index:

Googlebot will see the noindex meta tag and will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.

In the same help guide, Google also mentions that if your page is still appearing even with noindex, there's a chance that they haven't crawled the site since you've added the tag. If you can, you could use webmaster tools to fetch as Google and check it out that way. They also mention in the guide that if your robots.txt is blocking the URL from the crawler, Google can't see the page to recheck the tag, if that makes sense? It could be the double whammy of robots.txt and noindex is causing a quasi Catch-22: The robots.txt is blocking Google from seeing the noindex, so Google can't act on the noindex. That's kind of a Catch-22, but I'm probably being a bit liberal with the reference there.

Hope this helps.

[SSFCU]

Yes! Thank you! Going to fetch as Google and see if that sheds any light.

[ecommercebc]

Awesome, be good to hear how you get on. If you get 'Denied by Robots.txt' when fetching, then the help guide should cover it from there (remove files from robots.txt disallow, refetch to pick up noindex and take it from there).

[SSFCU]

Thank you so much. I'm a content gal, so I'm still learning all this coding stuff as fast as I can. Really appreciate the help.

[ecommercebc]

Things like this can be a little tricky to dissect anyway. Most important thing is that you're doing things right, it's just accounting for Google's ability to crawl.