A noindex tag is never seen when the same URL is disallowed in robots.txt
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:53:17.702Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:53:17.702Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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The two directives interact badly in one specific way: a crawler forbidden to fetch the page cannot read the noindex meta tag inside it, so the page remains eligible for indexing from external links. Adding both, which looks like belt and braces, is strictly worse than adding only the noindex.
The removal sequence is to drop the disallow, wait for the page to be recrawled and dropped from the index, and only then block crawling again if you still want to. For an urgent removal, the removals tool in Search Console hides a URL temporarily while the noindex takes effect. The same reasoning applies to canonical annotations, hreflang and structured data: every one of them is invisible on a page the crawler is not allowed to fetch.
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing
seoindexing
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