Indexability X-Ray

One signal is never enough

“Why isn’t this page indexed” almost never has a one-check answer, because the signals interact and can cancel each other out. The classic case: a page is blocked in robots.txt and also carries a noindex. Google can’t crawl it, so it never reads the noindex, so the URL sits in the index anyway. Or a noindexed page canonicals to its live twin, which Google largely ignores, since a page excluded from the index makes a poor canonical source.

This reads the signals together and gives you the effective outcome instead of a checklist.

What it detects

• robots.txt blocking, evaluated for Googlebot, with the matching rule shown
• noindex in meta robots and in the X-Robots-Tag header, plus any disagreement between the two
• Canonicals in both the tag and the HTTP header, including whether the canonical target is live, redirecting, or broken. Pointing a canonical at a 404 is a common way to deindex yourself by accident.
• Redirects, since the URL you asked about may just consolidate somewhere else
• The paradox cases: robots-block plus noindex, noindex plus canonical-elsewhere, index and noindex conflicting across sources

A clean result means the page is indexable. Whether Google chooses to index it is a separate fight.