Robots directives (noindex, nofollow, and others)What it checks and how to fix it

What it checks

Collects robots directives from <meta name="robots">, googlebot, bingbot and yandex meta tags, and from the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header. It warns when the page is noindex, or when it carries another restrictive directive (nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noimageindex or none); it passes when there are no directives or only non-restrictive ones.

Why it matters

A stray noindex is one of the most damaging SEO mistakes: the page disappears from search results no matter how good it is, and it often ships unnoticed from a staging configuration. Restrictive directives such as nofollow or nosnippet are quieter but still cut link equity or strip your search snippet. If you did not mean to set them, you are losing traffic.

How to fix it

Decide whether the page should be indexed. If it should, remove the restrictive directives; the default with no tag at all is index, follow.

<!-- remove this -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
<!-- or state the default explicitly -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

If the directive comes from the X-Robots-Tag header, remove it from the server or CDN configuration:

# nginx: delete lines like this one from the server block
add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex";

# Apache (.htaccess or vhost): delete
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"

# Rails: look for a header set in a controller or middleware
response.headers["X-Robots-Tag"] = "noindex" # remove for public pages

On Cloudflare, check Transform Rules (Modify Response Header) for a rule that adds X-Robots-Tag. Once fixed, request re-indexing with the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console.