Sitemapper

Critical

noindex URL listed in the sitemap

A URL is advertised in the sitemap while the page (or header) tells crawlers not to index it.

Why it matters

Sitemaps should list URLs you want discovered. Mixing noindex with sitemap inclusion wastes crawl budget and sends mixed signals.

Example

https://example.com/thank-you is in sitemap.xml and contains <meta name="robots" content="noindex">.

How Sitemapper detects it

Sitemapper fetches the live page and looks for a robots meta or X-Robots-Tag noindex directive.

Verify it yourself

Open the URL, view source, and check meta robots plus response headers. Confirm the URL is still in the sitemap.

Practical fix

Remove the URL from the sitemap, or remove noindex if the page should be indexed. Do not leave both.

Official documentation

Run this check on a site