Do your sitemap and index signals agree?
Google learns about a page from several signals — the sitemap, the canonical tag, robots meta, the X-Robots-Tag header. When they disagree, Google trusts the page and ignores the sitemap, so the entry is wasted and the wrong URL gets indexed.
Cross-checks the sitemap, canonicals and robots signals on a sample of your pages. Nothing is stored.
How this check works
Shipwork fetches a sample of your pages and compares four signals per URL: is it in the sitemap, is it noindex (meta or header), does its canonical point elsewhere, and what status it returns. It reports pages in the sitemap that are noindex or canonicalised away, and indexable pages that are missing from the sitemap — the two conflicts behind most "why is this page not indexed" cases.
Questions
- Why would a sitemap URL be noindex?
- Usually a template default (a tag page, a filtered collection, a thank-you page) that got swept into the sitemap. Google is told both "crawl this" and "do not index this", and it obeys the noindex.
- What is a signal conflict?
- Any two signals that disagree about a URL: sitemap says index, robots says noindex; or sitemap lists a URL whose canonical points elsewhere. Google resolves the conflict against the sitemap.
- Does this need Search Console?
- No. It reads the public sitemap, canonicals, robots meta and headers from outside your network, the way a crawler does.