Intermittent Noindex Tags

[harrytwatter]

I keep finding pages from a client site included in their Google Search Console's "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" report. However when I test the live URL and view the page indexability settings they are both set to "index".

Initially thought Cloudflare's default security challenge page was the root cause given it contained a "noindex,nofollow" tag but this seem to not be the case.

Given I can't catch these phantom "noindex" tags live I can't help but continue to suspect this is occurring as Googlebot first hits the page.

Anyone have similar experiences or ideas? Sucks seeing high value content show up in these noindex reports :/

 

[ryandiscord]

Have you tried mimicking Googlebot to see what returns? You can set your user agent in a tool like Screaming Frog or with a browser extension.

You could also try switching Cloudflare to development mode that will turn off the cache temporarily.