In July we removed a noindex tag from the 63 case study pages on this site. In October we checked Google’s side for the first time and found 57 of them still listed as excluded by noindex tag, with a last crawl date from 2025. The pages had been open to Google for three months. Google simply had not come back to look. This is the story of how that happened, how we found it, and the check we now run on every site we manage.
What the status actually means
Search Console’s Page indexing report lists a page as excluded by noindex tag when the last version of that page Google fetched carried a noindex directive, either as a meta tag in the HTML or as an X-Robots-Tag header. Google’s own documentation is clear on the sequence: the status reflects the last crawl, and if the tag has since been removed you can ask for the page to be recrawled with Request Indexing. The Page indexing report help page spells this out, and the noindex guide explains that a page only drops out of the index after Google has crawled it and seen the tag.
The part most people miss is the mirror image. Google also only lets a page back in after it has crawled it and seen the tag gone. There is no automatic re-check. If a page has been marked noindex for a long time, Google has little reason to return, so the old verdict can sit there for months.
How we got here
When we rebuilt this site in July, the portfolio section had been noindexed for well over a year. We lifted the tag, confirmed in the page source that every case page now said index, follow, added them to the sitemap, and wrote “now indexed” in our notes. That last line was the mistake. We had verified the page, not Google’s record of the page.
Over the following three months we rewrote the case descriptions, added headings, added deliverables and outcome sections and tightened the internal links. Google saw almost none of it, because it never fetched the pages. Our nightly site checks, which read the live HTML, kept reporting everything green. The live pages were fine. The problem lived on Google’s side, and nothing we ran looked there.
There was a second, quieter cause. The sitemap index that lists the case pages had been submitted to Search Console under the www version of the domain, while the site itself runs without www. The URL Inspection tool showed “no referring sitemaps detected” for every case page. Google had a path to find them, but not the one we thought we had given it.
How we found it
The URL Inspection tool has an API, and it will answer for every URL in a sitemap at up to 2,000 requests a day per property. We ran it across all 168 URLs on the site as part of a three-month review of our own SEO and GEO work. The result took a minute to read and a while to accept: 104 indexed, 57 case pages excluded by noindex tag, 3 discovered but not indexed, 4 unknown to Google.
The live test inside the same tool confirmed the other half of the picture. For each case page it reported “URL is available to Google” and “page can be indexed”. Current page good, stored verdict stale.
What we did about it
- Resubmitted the sitemap index under the non-www domain property and removed the www entry.
- Requested indexing for the most important case pages through the Search Console interface. The quota is roughly ten URLs per property per day, so this is a queue, not a button.
- Updated the modified date on every case page so the sitemap stops telling Google they last changed in 2025.
- Added a weekly index sweep across every site we manage. It compares Google’s stored status for each sitemap URL with the live page and flags three things: live page indexable but Google says noindex, no verified Googlebot crawl in 60 days, and submitted more than 14 days ago but still not indexed.
The first requests went in on 12 October. We will report back on how long Google took to update the verdict, because that number is the one every guide skips.
The check to run on your own site
You do not need the API for a quick look. Open Search Console, choose Pages under Indexing, and read the “Why pages aren’t indexed” table. If “Excluded by noindex tag” appears and you believe the tag is gone, pick one URL, inspect it, run Test live URL, and compare the two answers. A stale verdict shows as “URL is not on Google” on the index tab and “URL is available to Google” on the live test. That pair is your signal to click Request Indexing and then wait.
Two habits prevent the whole thing. First, after any change to indexing rules, verify on Google’s side, not just in your page source. Second, make sure your sitemap is submitted under the property that matches your canonical domain, with or without www, exactly as the site serves it. We cover this ground in our local SEO work for Melbourne businesses, and it applies just as much to AI search, where a page that is not in Google’s index is also not available to the assistants that lean on it.
Full disclosure felt like the right way to open this section of the site. If an agency that sells search work can miss this for 93 days on its own domain, a busy business owner can certainly miss it on theirs. More about how we work is on our About page.
How long does Google take to re-index a page after noindex is removed?
There is no fixed time. Google recrawls a page on its own schedule, and a page that has been noindexed for a long time is crawled less often. Requesting indexing puts the URL in a priority queue, but Google does not promise a time. Days to weeks is common; months is possible if nothing prompts a recrawl.
Does removing noindex from the page source fix the Search Console status?
Not on its own. The status in the Page indexing report reflects the last version Google crawled. Until Google fetches the page again and sees the tag is gone, the report keeps showing excluded by noindex tag. Use the URL Inspection tool’s live test to confirm the current page is indexable, then request indexing.
Can a sitemap submitted under the wrong property hide pages from Google?
It will not block crawling, because Google can still discover pages through links and through a sitemap declared in robots.txt. It does mean the sitemap report in Search Console shows nothing for those pages, and the URL Inspection tool reports no referring sitemap. Submit the sitemap under the property that matches the domain your site actually serves.
