site.canonical-target-noindex
Pages name as canonical a page that is set to noindex, so the page meant to be indexed is kept out of the index.
What to change
Remove noindex from the canonical page, or point the canonical somewhere indexable. If both pages should stay out of search results, use noindex on both and drop the canonical.
The documentation on developers.google.comA finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.
When it runs
Runs on a crawl or a build directory. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.
The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.
Run it, or skip it
Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:
npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.canonical-target-noindexOr from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:
{
"url": "https://example.com",
"rules": [
"site.canonical-target-noindex"
]
}To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.canonical-target-noindex on the command, or disableRules: ["site.canonical-target-noindex"] to a tool.
More in Site-wide checks
All 49 rules- Warning
site.broken-external-linksExternal links point to URLs that return 4xx/5xx or fail to load. - Info
site.unlinked-pagesHTML files in the build output that no other page links to. - Error
site.canonical-target-brokenPages name a canonical URL that answers 4xx/5xx or does not load, so search engines cannot use it. - Warning
site.canonical-target-redirectsPages name a canonical URL that redirects; the canonical should be the final URL. - Warning
site.canonical-chainA page's canonical points to a page whose own canonical points somewhere else (A to B to C). - Info
site.links-to-noindexPages set to noindex are linked from other pages of the site. A noindex page that much of the site links to is often noindex by mistake. Cart, search, login and account pages are left out. - Warning
site.hreflang-target-invalidhreflang alternates point to URLs that are broken, redirect, are noindex or name another URL as canonical, so the annotation is ignored. - Warning
site.url-variant-duplicateA page also answers 200 at its URL with the trailing slash added or removed, or with the path in another case, without redirecting or naming the page as canonical. Google treats each spelling as a separate URL.