Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??

[NickG-123]

Hi,

I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues.

The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare).

I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file.

Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on.

Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing.

Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here?

Thanks,

[Keszi]

Hey,

Try fetch and render from Google Search Console. There you could check if there is an X-Robots-Tag in the response header.

For reference: https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag