The “Noindex page receives organic traffic” error indicates a situation where a web page marked with a noindex tag which instructs search engines not to index the page, is still appearing in search results and receiving organic traffic.
This can happen due to several reasons:
- Recent change: The “noindex” tag might have been added recently, and search engines haven’t had enough time to recrawl and update their index accordingly.
- Internal links: If other pages on your website link to the noindexed page, search engines might discover it through these links, even though it’s marked as noindex.
- Incorrect implementation: Noindex tag might be improperly formatted or not placed in the correct location on the page, causing search engines to miss it.
- Blocked robots.txt: The robots.txt file, which controls how search engines crawl your website, might be inaccessible to search engine crawlers, preventing them from seeing the “noindex” directive.
Why This Issue is Reported And How to Fix?
Sometimes, a website user can accidentally add a noindex tag to a page that receives organic traffic. These pages would also be reported in this issue.
How to Fix “Noindex Page Receives Organic Traffic” Issue?
- If you don’t want these index pages to be indexed, such as event pages that are no longer needed after the event has passed, you can set them to noindex. However, even after setting them to noindex, they may still be reported as errors in the Ahrefs site audit.
- To fix this issue, you can remove internal links from index pages to the noindex pages. This is because Googlebot does not crawl noindex pages when crawling the site. But if there are internal links pointing to noindex pages, Googlebot will crawl these noindex pages, which is why this issue is reported.
- However, if you do want these noindex pages to be indexed or if these pages are supposed to be indexable, you can remove the noindex tag from these pages to fix the issue.
Conclusion:
Noindex page receives organic traffic error signifies a discrepancy between your website’s intended SEO strategy and how search engines perceive your pages. Addressing this error is crucial to optimize website performance and prevent wasted crawl budget on pages you don’t want indexed.
