A listed page asks to stay out of search

Why it matters

Google asks for the URLs you want to see in its results to be listed in your sitemap. A noindex, in a meta tag or an HTTP header, makes Google drop the page from its results when it crawls it, so the two signals contradict each other.

What to do

1. Look at the finding: it shows the sitemap entry, the noindex it found in the page or its header, and up to ten links to the page.
2. If the page should be found in search, remove the noindex in your website editor or SEO plugin.
3. If it should stay out, such as an order confirmation page, remove it from the sitemap; most plugins leave noindex pages out when set to.

What we read

We check the pages listed in your sitemap that our crawl fetched: it starts at your homepage and follows links, reserving every tenth page it fetches, up to 20, for sitemap addresses by default, within the audit's page limit. A listed page is checked when it answers 200 with HTML; the homepage is left to its own check.

A page is reported when a <meta name="robots"> or <meta name="googlebot"> tag, or an X-Robots-Tag header that applies to all crawlers or to Googlebot, contains noindex or none. Tags for other crawlers, such as bingbot, do not count, and 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 listed page, not a live audit.

https://bakery.example/sitemap.xml lists:

<url><loc>https://bakery.example/order/thank-you</loc></url>

The page answers 200, and its head contains:

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

The sitemap lists the page and the page asks to stay out of search, so it is reported with both the sitemap entry and the tag.

A possible correction: a thank-you page belongs out of search, so remove its <url> entry from the sitemap and keep the noindex.

Confirm & check again

Check for yourself: open the page's source and search for noindex, look for X-Robots-Tag in its response headers, and check whether your sitemap lists it.

Check again: Full audit — run a new audit of the site. The finding is confirmed fixed only when every sitemap is read in full, every page it lists other than the homepage is reached by the crawl and answers 200 with complete HTML that is not only a frame for scripts, and this page answers directly with 200 and a complete HTML page; on a sitemap larger than the crawl reaches, no change can be confirmed. A page taken out of the sitemap is confirmed only if the crawl still reaches it, for example through a link, and it answers directly with 200 and a complete HTML page or a file that is not HTML, or starts with a permanent redirect within your site.

Limits & sources

Only the listed pages our crawl reaches are checked, and a noindex added or removed by JavaScript is not seen. We use our own user agent, so a server that treats Googlebot differently is not observed, and the check does not tell whether Google has already dropped the page.

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

Sources

• Google, Build and submit a sitemap — asks you to include in your sitemap the URLs you want to see in Google's search results. Checked 25 September 2026.
• Google, Block Search indexing with noindex — describes noindex as a meta tag or an HTTP header, and says Google drops a page that carries it from its results. Checked 25 September 2026.

Editorial review: 29 September 2026

Related

• A listed address is blocked by robots.txt — robots.txt forbids fetching the listed page, so a noindex could not be read.
• A listed page names another page as the main one — the listed page points to another page as the main one; both can apply to one page.
• A listed page returns 404 or 410 — the listed page is gone rather than kept out of search.