Noindex in Sitemap
Listing noindexed pages in your sitemap sends contradictory signals to Googlebot—it wastes crawl budget and may confuse Google into ignoring the noindex directive or spending crawl time on pages you don't want indexed.
Quick Reference
- Never include noindexed pages in your XML sitemap
- The sitemap and noindex directive send contradictory signals to crawlers
- Sitemaps should only list canonical-url, indexable, 200-status URLs
- Remove noindexed URLs from sitemap or remove the noindex directive—pick one
Check
Fetch the XML sitemap(s) and check each listed URL. For each URL, retrieve the page and check for <meta name='robots' content='noindex'> in the <head> or an X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header. Report any URLs present in the sitemap that also carry a noindex directive.
Fix
For each URL that has a noindex directive AND appears in the sitemap: decide whether the page should be indexed. If yes — remove the noindex directive. If no — remove the URL from the sitemap. Never leave both in place.
Explain
The XML sitemap is a recommendation to search engines: 'please crawl and index these pages'. A noindex directive is an instruction: 'do not in…
