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Discoverability

Why is my site not appearing in Google — noindex

A noindex directive tells search engines to exclude the page outright. No amount of content or backlinks produces traffic until it is removed, and it is the most common thing to survive a staging-to-production move.

What 13x checks

This is rule discoverability.noindex in the public registry: No accidental noindex. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
Discoverability
Score weight
20 of the readiness score
Scope
Runs on every audited page
Applies
To every site

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

Remove the noindex directive. It appears in one of two places:

html code
<!-- 1. A meta tag in the document head -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
Configuration
# 2. A response header
X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Check for an environment-conditional that was meant for preview deployments only — this is almost always a staging guard that shipped. After removing it, re-request indexing in Google Search Console; removal is not detected quickly on its own.

Framework-specific versions

Where the change differs enough to be worth writing out separately.

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