Every page on your site can tell Google: "show me in the search results, or don't." By default everything is set to 'show'. But with an instruction called 'noindex' you can hide a page from Google.
When do you want to use 'noindex'?
- Thank-you pages: "thanks for your request" has no search value, so you do not want it as a search result
- Login pages, admin pages: internal things nobody needs to find
- Duplicates: if you have two nearly identical pages, you can remove one of them from Google
- Temporary pages: a landing page for a campaign that you will take down later
- Test pages: a page you are still building that is not finished yet
Why is this potentially dangerous?
If 'noindex' is accidentally switched on for your important pages (homepage, service pages, blogs), you lose all your Google traffic. The page disappears from the results and customers can no longer find you.
This happens more often than you think:
- When building a new site, you switch on 'noindex' to avoid being indexed too early, and forget to switch it off at launch
- A plugin does something unexpected
- An employee or intern accidentally ticks the wrong box
How do you check it is set correctly?
Go to your page in the browser. Right-click → 'View page source'. Search the text for 'noindex'. If you find it in <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, it is switched on. You do NOT want that on your important pages.
Extra check: Google Search Console shows which of your pages have been indexed. If a page is listed there as 'Excluded by noindex tag', you know something is wrong.
What if it is switched on by accident?
Remove it straight away. In WordPress with an SEO plugin: edit the page, tick 'index this page', save. Without a plugin: remove the meta tag from the code. It can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before Google indexes the page again, so the sooner you notice, the better.