Noindex No Longer Means Not Rendered

A Change to How Google Treats noindex Pages

Previously, Google would not pass a page through their Web Rendering Service (WRS) if it had a noindex directive, and indeed this is still documented in the Google Search Central documentation.

See Update at the end of this post.

Basically that meant that if a page had a noindex directive, JavaScript on that page would not be executed, and the page would not be rendered.

One of the important assumed side effects of this was that if you had a page with a noindex directive and removed the noindex directive, that wouldn't work, because that removal would not happen.

However, for a while now, the live testing tools, like the URL Inspection Tool, or the rich results test have gone ahead and rendered the page, noindex or not.

I initially assumed this was because it's a live test, and perhaps the actual indexing pipeline was still not rendering noindex pages.

But after seeing some interesting web log entries on a client's site, I started to wonder if Google was now rendering noindex pages in the indexing pipeline as well.

So I decided to test this out.

Creating some Tests

I created a few tests to see if my suspicion that Google was now rendering noindex pages was correct or not.

Test 1: Fetching in a page with a noindex robots meta tag

I have a test site I like to use for this kind of thing, I do think that hese kinds of test sites are perhaps a little less useful than they used to be, especially when looking around indexing, as there's always an element of doubt about whether Googlebot is actually going to treat the page and site in the same way as it would a page on a real site. But in this case, the tests are fairly binary, with distinct outcomes, and whilst it can take a little longer for the results to come through, I think it's still a useful way to test this.

I created a page with a noindex robots meta tag, that also had a fetch request in it. The noindex is also removed by JavaScript. You can see the test page here: noindex removed by JavaScript.

The endpoint the fetch requests records the user agent, and the URL it was fetched from, so I can see if Googlebot is fetching it. I also monitored the server's web logs for the endpoint as a second corroborating data point to see if it was fetched, and double check the method used to fetch it, i.e. GET or POST.

Result of Test 1

The fetch request was made by Googlebot, and the method used was POST. The page was still however treated as a noindex page, and was not indexed.

Search Console Status: Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Last Crawl Date: 2025-05-20T16:16

Test 2: Fetching in a page with a noindex HTTP header

For the second test, I created a page that had a X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header, and also had a fetch request in it. No ability to remove the noindex in this case, JavaScript cannot override HTTP headers. You can see the test page here: X-Robot-Tag rendered?.

Result of Test 2

The fetch request was made by Googlebot, and the method used was POST. The page was still treated as a noindex page, and was not indexed. So fundamentally, the same outcome as Test 1.

Search Console Status: Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Last Crawl Date: 2025-06-22T23:36

Test 3: Fetching in a page with a 404 HTTP status code

For the third test, I created a page that returned a 404 HTTP status code, and also had a fetch request in it. You can see the test page here: non-200 pages and rendering.

Result of Test 3

No fetch request was made by Googlebot, and the page was not rendered. It seems that Googlebot does not render 404 pages.

Search Console Status: Not found (404)
Last Crawl Date: 2025-06-22T23:36

Test 4: Fetching in a page with a noindex robots meta tag, with a JavaScript redirect

For the fourth test, I created a page that had a noindex robots meta tag, and also had a JavaScript redirect to another page. You can see the test page here: noindex with JavaScript redirect.

Result of Test 4

The fetch request was made by Googlebot, and the method used was POST. The page was still treated as a noindex page, and was not indexed. The URL that the JavaScript redirected to was also not indexed, and remains as URL is unknown to Google, and whilst that could indicate that Google just didn't care to try the page, the fact the page is reported as Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag rather than Page with Redirect, suggests that the noindex directive was respected, and the redirect was not followed.

Search Console Status: Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
Last Crawl Date: 2025-06-22T16:56

Conclusion

It seems that Google is now rendering noindex pages, at least in the context of fetch requests.

The fact that the requests made to the test API endpoint were made with a POST method, and not a GET method gives me more confidence that these requests are being made as part of the rendering process, and not because a URL like string was extracted from the page and speculatively fetched.

However, the fact that the pages were still treated as noindex pages, and not indexed, suggests that Google is not indexing these pages, so the advice to not remove noindex directives from pages you want indexed still stands.

But it does have implications for larger, complex sites, essentially you might now be spending resources on rendering pages that you don't want indexed, and if that's for a large number of pages, that could be a significant amount of resources being spent on pages for no benefit for you.

I have in the past seen sites that noindex things like their search results pages, or faceted navigation pages, both of which can make (relatively) heavy calls to endpoints to render the page, and if Google is now rendering those pages, that could be a significant amount of resources being spent on pages that you don't want indexed.

Perhaps time to evaluate robots.txt rules instead?

I will also caveat this with the fact that I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, and the behaviour may change back in the future, and noindex pages may not be rendered again.