Page set to noindex and nofollow

What it is

The page’s robots meta tag blocks both indexing and link following, either with the single value none or with noindex and nofollow together. The page is kept out of search results, and search engines are asked not to follow any of its links. That suits a private or short-lived page, and it is a serious mistake on a page you want found.

Why it matters

Google defines none as equivalent to noindex, nofollow. The page drops out of results, which also keeps it out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, since those link only to indexed pages . On top of that, the pages it links to lose it as a route for crawlers. Next to values like all, none can read as harmless, so it is easy to choose in a settings dropdown or copy from another template.

How Asky checks it

Asky reads every robots and googlebot meta tag in the page’s raw HTML, with the name in any letter case, and splits their combined content at commas and spaces. The page is reported when one value is none, alone or next to others as in none, noarchive, or when the values include both noindex and nofollow, even from separate tags, in any letter case. noindex, nofollow also raises the noindex and nofollow issues; none raises only this one. Tags for other crawlers and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header are not read.

Reported as a warning with high severity.

How to fix it

Decide whether this page should appear in search.
To leave it as it is: if the page is meant to stay hidden and its links lead nowhere you need crawled, such as an account area, mark the issue resolved.
If the page should be found, remove the tag, and any googlebot tag with none, noindex or nofollow, or set it to index, follow.
If the page should stay out of the index but its links should be followed, use noindex on its own. That clears this issue and the nofollow issue, and leaves the noindex issue to mark resolved.
Find where the value is set: a robots option in an SEO plugin or the CMS page settings, a template for the whole section, or head custom code. Check the X-Robots-Tag response header as well.
Do not block the page in robots.txt while the change takes effect: Google has to crawl it again to see the new rule.

Example

https://example.com/blog/pricing-guide should rank, but its template says none:


<!-- Before -->
<meta name="robots" content="none">
 
<!-- After -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

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