Site moved. Unable to index page : Noindex detected in robots meta tag?!

[bgvsiteadmin]

Hope someone can shed some light on this:

We moved our smaller site  (into the main site (  different domains) .

The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
Directory  where the site was moved  (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals)

Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on).

Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message  :

Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!

[effectdigital]

I love these kinds of questions. You have shared a moved page URL, can you give us the URL it resided at before it was moved, which 'should' be redirecting now? That would massively help

Edit: found this one:

https://www.bluegreenrentals.com/searchresults.aspx?s=CO&sl=COLORADO

(this is what the page apparently used to look like before it was redirected, but the image is a little old from 2017 - OP can you confirm if it did look like this directly prior to redirect?)

... which 301 redirects to:

https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen

... gonna carry on looking but this example of the full chain may help any other Mozzers looking to answer this Q

Suspected issue at this juncture, which could be wrong (not loads to go on right now) - content dissimilarity between URLs leading Google to deny the 301s

FYI: info to help OP, the no-index stuff may be relating moreso to this:

https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag (may be deployed in the HTML as a tag, but can also be fired through the HTTP header which is another kettle of fish...)

[bgvsiteadmin]

Thank you for the quick reply.

Yes, that's right (URLs and page look from 2017. The site was old and neglected. We decided to give it a facelift, sunset domain in a few months and bring site under our main site.

While pages were still in development (but migrated from staging to live site), we needed to protect them from accidental indexation and flagged every page "no index" no follow".  Is it possible that google crawled pages in the past, got no index(as was set at that time) and never returned back? If that's' the case, should I manually request indexing?

[effectdigital]

That's hugely likely to have had an impact. No-indexing pages before they were ready was a mistake, but the much bigger mistake was releasing the site early before it was 'ready'. The site should only have been set live and released once ALL pages were ported to the new staging environment

Also, if all pages weren't yet live on the staging environment - how can the person looking at staging / the old site, have done all the 301 redirects properly?

When you no-index URLs you kill their SEO authority (dead). Often it never fully recovers and has to be restarted from scratch. In essence, a 301 to a no-indexed URL is moving the SEO authority from the old page into 'nowhere' (cyber oblivion)

The key learning is, don't set a half ready site live and finish development there. WAIT until you are ready, then perform your SEO / architectural / redirect maneuvering

Even if you hadn't no-indexed those new URLs, Google checks to see if the content on the old and new URLs is similar (think Boolean string similarity, in machine terms) before 'allowing' the SEO authority from the old URL to flow to the new one. If the content isn't basically the same, Google expects the pages to 'start over' and 're prove themselves'. Why? Well you tell me why a new page with different content, should benefit from the links of an old URL which was different - when the webmasters who linked to that old URL, may well not choose to link to the new one

Even if you hadn't no-indexed those new URLs, because they were incomplete their content was probably holding content (radically different from the content of the old URLs, on the old site) - it's extremely likely that even without the no-index tags, it still would have fallen flat on its face

In the end, your best course of actions is finish all the content, make sure the 301s are actually accurate (which by the sounds of it many of them won't be), lift the no-index tags, request re-indexation. If you are very, very lucky some of the SEO juice from the old URLs will still exist and the new URLs will get some shreds of authority through (which is better than nothing). In reality though the pooch is already screwed by this point