How to fix it
Decide which is right. Remove the noindex if the page should be found; remove it from the sitemap if it should not.
When it is not a problem
Usually the sitemap is wrong: it includes everything and the noindex was added deliberately. Occasionally the noindex is a leftover from staging, and then it is the real finding.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
- DetectionDetected on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
- GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
- LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
- VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.
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