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Playing with indexation tags can be dangerous (same goes for robots.txt). Google should still be able to read the repo even if it is no-indexed, as long as you haven't also blocked the repo in robots.txt. Robots.txt is telling Google what to crawl, no-index is telling Google what it can or can-not put in its search results Of course, if your docs were ranking because of PageRank passed from the repo, the no-index tag will kill the PageRank of the repo (and thus all the docs which it links to, as they are not being 'fed' any more). If a page is no-indexed, it's seen as unimportant for Google and the PageRank is often nullified. Although Google can crawl no-indexed URLs, they crawl them WAY slower as they're seen as really unimportant with no PageRank (at the bottom of the internet) Why not just put all your PDF docs in a PDF sitemap ans submit to Google in Search Console: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1072880/should-i-list-pdfs-in-my-sitemap-file This will let Google see them all. But if their parent is no-indexed with no PageRank, they may still not rank as well as before...