Check whether Google can actually index your page. Detects noindex, canonical conflicts, X-Robots-Tag headers, soft 404s, and crawl blockers.
The single most common SEO disaster is a page that nobody realises has been quietly de-indexed for months. A single `noindex` left in a CMS template, a misconfigured CDN header, a copy-pasted canonical pointing at staging — any one of these can wipe a page out of Google's index without warning. This checker is the fastest way to confirm a page can actually rank.
## The five ways Google decides not to index a page
1. **Meta robots noindex** — the most common, a `<meta name="robots" content="noindex">` in the head 2. **X-Robots-Tag header** — same effect, but sent via HTTP header (often by CDN or WAF rules) 3. **Canonical pointing away** — a `<link rel="canonical">` pointing at a different URL tells Google to index the canonical instead 4. **HTTP status** — anything other than 200 (with the exception of follow-able 3xx) signals "don't index this URL" 5. **Soft 404** — page returns 200 but the content is "not found" — Google detects and de-indexes
This tool checks all five in one request.
## The canonical trap
Canonicals are the most misunderstood SEO directive. The rules: - **Self-referencing canonicals are best practice** — every page should canonical to itself - A canonical pointing at a different URL is a strong hint, not a command — Google ignores it ~25% of the time when the target obviously isn't equivalent - A canonical pointing at staging.example.com (the classic deploy mistake) tells Google your prod page is a duplicate of an unreachable URL — death sentence for indexing
## X-Robots-Tag — the invisible noindex
Because it's an HTTP header, X-Robots-Tag is invisible in "view source" — developers can't see it without inspecting the network panel or using a tool like this. CDNs (Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify) often add `X-Robots-Tag: noindex` on preview or staging deployments. If that header survives the promotion to production, you have a silent disaster.
## What about robots.txt?
robots.txt blocks **crawling**, not **indexing** — if a URL is linked from elsewhere, Google can still index it without ever crawling it (showing a SERP entry with no description). To prevent indexing, use noindex, not robots.txt. To prevent crawling AND indexing, allow crawling so Google sees the noindex, then add the noindex.
## Soft 404 detection
Google's definition of a soft 404 is fuzzy and undocumented — they look at content length, presence of "not found" strings, structural similarity to your real 404 page, and traffic patterns. Our heuristic catches the easy cases (very short response, telltale phrases) but Google's detection is more aggressive. The safe pattern: serve a real 404 status for missing pages, always.
A page that isn't indexable cannot rank — no matter how good the content is. The most common SEO disaster is a single accidental `noindex` in a CMS template silently de-indexing thousands of pages. This checker tells you in 5 seconds whether your page can rank at all.
We fetch the URL with a Googlebot-compatible User-Agent and a 15-second timeout, following redirects up to 5 hops. We capture the final HTTP status code, every relevant header (X-Robots-Tag, Cache-Control, Content-Type), and the full HTML body. From the HTML we extract `<meta name="robots">`, `<link rel="canonical">`, the `<title>`, and structural signals for soft-404 detection. Each indexability blocker is reported separately so you can fix them one at a time. We do NOT execute JavaScript — this matches what Googlebot sees on its first pass and surfaces issues that JS-rendered checks would miss.
Enter the starting URL. The checker follows every hop and shows each status code in order, so you can see whether a link passes through two or three redirects before landing — each extra hop wastes crawl budget and leaks a little link equity.
The result includes the rel="canonical" value found in the HTML and in the HTTP headers, plus a warning when the two disagree or when the canonical points at a different page than the one you requested.
This tool tells you whether a specific URL is technically indexable — no noindex, no blocked robots rule, no conflicting canonical. For the full list of what Google actually holds, pair it with the Index Coverage report in Search Console.
Indexability is the floor, not the ceiling. Once a page is indexable, ranking depends on content quality, backlinks, internal linking, intent match, and competition. This tool confirms the floor — for ranking diagnosis, use the SEO audit.
For low-value pages with no backlinks: yes, noindex them so they don't dilute your site's perceived quality. For pages with backlinks pointing at them: 301-redirect to a stronger page instead, to preserve the link equity.
Yes — Google treats X-Robots-Tag exactly like the meta robots tag. Bingbot, Yandex, and most other major crawlers do too.
It tells Google "don't index this URL, index the canonical instead." If the canonical is intentionally different (e.g. consolidating duplicates), that's fine. If it's a mistake (e.g. left over from staging), Google will de-index your real page.
Once Google recrawls the URL and sees the noindex, it removes the page within days. To force this, request indexing in Google Search Console after fixing the issue.
Enter the starting URL. The checker follows every hop and shows each status code in order, so you can see whether a link passes through two or three redirects before landing — each extra hop wastes crawl budget and leaks a little link equity.
The result includes the rel="canonical" value found in the HTML and in the HTTP headers, plus a warning when the two disagree or when the canonical points at a different page than the one you requested.
This tool tells you whether a specific URL is technically indexable — no noindex, no blocked robots rule, no conflicting canonical. For the full list of what Google actually holds, pair it with the Index Coverage report in Search Console.