Can noindex pages still rank?

No. A page with a noindex directive is removed from the index, usually within days to weeks.

What is X-Robots-Tag for?

It applies robots directives at the HTTP layer, which is how you noindex PDFs, images and JSON files that have no HTML to put a meta tag in.

Does robots.txt blocking make a page unindexable?

Not by itself. It stops crawling, but the URL can still be indexed from external links.

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Indexability checker

Enter a URL. The tool fetches the page and its headers and reports everything that decides indexability: meta robots, X-Robots-Tag, canonical and the status code.

The four signals

Meta robots: noindex in the HTML takes the page out of the index.
X-Robots-Tag: the same directive as an HTTP header, the only way to noindex non-HTML files.
Canonical: pointing at a different URL means this URL is not the one to index.
Status: anything but 200 changes what a crawler stores.

Nothing else matters if one of these says no.

Indexability checker

The four signals

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