What the error means
The page carries a noindex instruction — a meta robots tag in the HTML or an X-Robots-Tag header — telling Google not to list it. In Search Console these pages show under "Excluded by noindex tag", and they are invisible in search no matter how good they are.
Why Google rejects it
Nobody usually decides this deliberately. Staging pages migrated with their noindex intact, an SEO plugin’s "discourage search engines" checkbox, a theme snippet applied store-wide, or an app that sets the header during setup. The instruction is one line into the head — invisible in a rendered page and absent from any admin preview.
How to fix it
- Confirm the instruction: view-source on the live page and search for robots; also check the X-Robots-Tag response header — the meta tag and the header are separate instructions and either one excludes.
- Find the scope: if many pages are excluded, the cause is a template or plugin setting, not individual pages. Fix the source and the whole set clears.
- Remove noindex from pages that should rank; keep it deliberately on thin or private pages you do not want competing with your money pages.
- Re-request indexing after the fix — the exclusion status persists until the next crawl picks up the change.
Shipwork fetches your key pages from outside your network and reads the exact signals a crawler reads first — the meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag header — naming every page told not to be indexed. Free, no account, no signup — paste your store address.
Check my storeGo deeper: Pages not indexed, fixed
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