Teardown
Noindex pages in the sitemap: asking Google to index a page, and not to, at once
Rare, and not dangerous. But it is a sign that two parts of the site stopped talking to each other.
On this page
5 of the 42 startup sites I audited listed pages in their sitemap that were also marked noindex. On the median affected site it was 7 pages.
It is the least common finding here, and one of the least harmful. It earns a teardown because of what it reveals.
What I found
42 startup sites, 14,023 pages, crawled 15 to 18 September 2026
- Sites affected
- 5 of 42 (12%)
- Typical size
- 7 pages on the median affected site
The contradiction
A sitemap tells Google: these are the pages I want you to index. A noindex tag on a page tells Google: do not index this one. When a page carries both, the site is saying yes and no at the same time.
Google's guidance on sitemaps asks for the first of those, not the second:
Include the URLs in your sitemap that you want to see in Google's search results.
Google Search Central, building a sitemap
Which instruction wins
The noindex does. Google's documentation on blocking indexing describes what happens once it reads the tag:
When Googlebot crawls that page and extracts the tag or header, Google will drop that page entirely from Google Search results, regardless of whether other sites link to it.
Google Search Central, blocking indexing
So nothing is indexed by accident. The cost is small: a sitemap with entries that will never be indexed, and a report that lists them as excluded, which makes a real exclusion harder to spot.
What it usually reveals
Someone decided these pages should stay out of search: thank-you pages, internal tools, thin tag pages, drafts. That decision was made in one place and never reached whatever writes the sitemap. Where that happens once, it is worth asking what else the two disagree about.
Check your own site, no code needed
- Once Search Console is set up, open the Pages report and choose All submitted pages in the filter above the chart.
- Look for pages excluded because of a noindex tag. Each one is in your sitemap and also asking not to be indexed.
- For each, decide which instruction is the real one.
What to ask your developer
- Should this page be in search results? If yes, can the noindex come off? If no, can it come out of the sitemap?
- Can the sitemap leave out every page marked noindex automatically?
What I could not tell from outside
Five sites is a small number. Treat this as an example of the pattern, not a rate.
I could not tell from outside whether any of these pages were meant to be indexed and were marked noindex by mistake. That would be the more serious version.
These are counts on 42 startup sites I audited from the outside, mostly developer tools and SaaS. They are not an industry average, and nothing here measured whether any of these sites performed worse in search because of what I found.
Want to know which of these your site has?
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