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The page named as the main one asks to stay out of search

In the reportCanonical target noindex

canonical_target_noindex · Issue

Short answer

This appears when pages name an address on your site as their canonical, and that address carries a noindex directive. The pages point search engines to a page that asks to stay out of search. Point the canonicals at a page that can be indexed, or remove the noindex.

Severity: High. Fix it soon: if Googlebot can crawl the named address and sees its noindex, Google drops that address from Search.

Why it matters

Google advises against using noindex to steer which page becomes canonical, because noindex blocks the page from Search entirely; a canonical is the preferred way. A canonical that names a noindex page sends the two signals against each other.

What to do

  1. Look at the finding: it shows the named page, the noindex found in its HTML or header, and the pages that name it.
  2. If the named page should be in search, remove its noindex.
  3. If it should not, change the canonicals on the listed pages to a page that can be indexed.

What we read

We read the canonical of each crawled page and group pages by the one other address on your site they name. That address is found in the crawl, or fetched separately when the crawl did not reach it, up to 20 per audit by default, following redirects and respecting robots.txt.

The named page is reported when its final answer is 2xx and it carries noindex or none in a <meta name="robots"> or <meta name="googlebot"> tag, or in an X-Robots-Tag header that applies to all crawlers or to Googlebot. A named page that redirects to a noindex page is reported too. In one X-Robots-Tag field such as bingbot: nofollow, noindex, both directives stay scoped to Bingbot; separate physical header fields are read independently.

Example & evidence

Illustrative example — one page and the page it names, not a live audit.

https://bakery.example/cakes/?sort=price declares:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://bakery.example/cakes/">

and https://bakery.example/cakes/ answers 200 with:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

The named page asks to stay out of search, so it is reported with the meta tag and the page that names it.

A possible correction: remove the robots meta from /cakes/, or make it index, follow, with no noindex header.

Confirm & check again

Check for yourself: open the named page's source and search for noindex, and look for X-Robots-Tag in its response headers.

Check again: Full audit — Run a new audit of the site. A sufficiently complete recheck of the same target can close this finding when its readable 2xx response no longer carries an applicable noindex directive. A target whose rendering or robots-directive coverage is insufficient cannot establish absence just because no noindex was observed. It can also close when complete, readable canonical inventories from every previously associated source page prove that none still names this address as its one canonical target. A complete inventory with multiple distinct canonicals may establish that; an unread or incomplete inventory cannot. A replacement target is judged separately: its health or robots policy is not part of proving that the old single-target group has disappeared. A missing, partial or non-HTML source response, or a redirect by itself, does not prove removal.

Limits & sources

A noindex added by JavaScript is not seen, and named pages beyond the 20 fetched separately are not checked.

Confidence: High because the directive is read directly from the named page or its header.

Sources

Editorial review: 2 November 2026