Search Console crawl error: Submitted URL marked noindex

In this article, we’ll take a look at the Google Search Console error Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’. What does this error mean and how can you fix it?

What does the error mean?

The page is not indexed. In other words, Google tried to index your page, but was unable to. The URL is listed in a sitemap, but something is preventing Google from indexing the page. That could either be a noindex meta tag in the page’s source code or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. As a result, the page will not show in the search results.

How to fix the ‘submitted URL marked noindex’ error

If you want Google to crawl and index your page, you must either:

• remove the meta tag: This is really easy if you use Yoast SEO. This article explains the steps. If you need to find the meta tag in the source code of the page, search for <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
• modify the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header: Check your HTTP headers for a noindex or noarchive or other negative header. That could look like this: X-Robots-Tag: noindex. You can modify the X-Robots-Tag using .htaccess and httpd.conf files that are available by default on Apache based web servers. You can also read more about the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.

If you don’t want Google to index your page, you should remove the URL from your sitemap. Google will notice the changes when it visits your site again. If you don’t want to wait until Google’s next visit, you can also resubmit the edited sitemap.

If you don’t want Google to index your page, you could also check your Sitemaps report and delete any sitemaps that contain the URL of the page. In addition, make sure that no sitemaps listed in your robots.txt file include this URL.

Ask Google to reindex your page

Once you’ve solved the problem, you can use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to check whether the error is really gone. This Google Webmasters video explains how to do that. If the noindex directive is indeed gone, you can ask Google to reindex your page, by clicking Request Indexing. This is also shown in the video.

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