Most pages checked ask to stay out of search
In the reportSitewide noindex pattern
sitewide_noindex_pattern · Issue
This appears when at least three pages were checked and 60% or more of them carry a noindex directive that applies to Google. That usually means a site-wide setting or theme is keeping pages out of search. Find the setting and remove it, unless the site is meant to stay out of search.
Severity: Critical. Fix it first. It is High when the homepage is not among the pages with noindex, and Critical when it is.
Why it matters
When Google crawls a page and finds noindex in a meta tag or an HTTP header, it drops that page from its results. If Googlebot can crawl the pages reported here and sees the same directive, they are dropped too; the share covers only the pages this audit fetched, not the whole site.
What to do
- Look at the finding: it shows how many pages were checked, how many carry noindex, and up to five of them with their directive.
- Find the shared setting that adds it, usually a site-wide switch in your website editor, an SEO plugin or a server rule, and turn it off.
- Run a new audit once the change is live.
When to leave it as it is: if the site is deliberately closed to search, such as a staging copy, leave it and remove it at launch.
What we read
We count the crawled pages on your site that answered 200 with HTML, one per final address, and those among them that carry noindex or none in a <meta name="robots"> or <meta name="googlebot"> tag, or in an X-Robots-Tag header for all crawlers or for Googlebot. In one X-Robots-Tag field such as bingbot: nofollow, noindex, both directives stay scoped to Bingbot; separate physical header fields are read independently.
The site is reported when at least three pages were checked and 60% or more carry noindex; both numbers are fixed. The share covers only the pages the audit fetched, not every page of the site. When this is reported, links to noindex pages are not reported separately.
Example & evidence
Illustrative example — five checked pages, not a live audit.
The audit checked /, /bread/, /cakes/, /about/ and /contact/ on https://bakery.example/, all answering 200. A theme adds this to three of them, /bread/, /cakes/ and /about/:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">Three of five is 60%, so the site is reported as High, because the homepage is not among them. Had the homepage carried it too, four of five would make it Critical.
A possible correction: turn off the theme setting; with two of five, 40%, the site is no longer reported.
Confirm & check again
Check for yourself: open a few pages' source and search for noindex; Search Console's Page indexing report lists pages excluded by noindex.
Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site. The finding is confirmed fixed only when that audit checks at least three pages, finds fewer than 60% with noindex, leaves out no page as only a frame for scripts, and is complete: not cut short by its page limit, with every address it found fetched and answered 200 and none refused by robots.txt.
Limits & sources
The share describes the pages the audit fetched, not every address on the site, and directives added by JavaScript are not seen. The check does not tell whether the pages are already out of Google's index.
Confidence: High because each directive is read directly from the pages and their headers.
Sources
- Google, Block Search indexing with noindex — describes noindex in a meta tag or an HTTP header, and that Google drops a page that carries it from its results. Checked 25 September 2026.
Editorial review: 29 September 2026