Sometimes, removing URLs from Google is not as straightforward as adding a NOINDEX tag. Many website owners and SEO teams face situations where an old URL continues appearing in Google search results even after implementing the correct SEO directives. This becomes even more confusing when the page is already blocked in robots.txt.
At Dhairvi Solutions, we recently faced a real-world technical SEO issue where an old URL remained indexed in Google despite having NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW implemented correctly. After detailed analysis, we discovered the actual issue was not the meta robots tag itself, but a crawl restriction inside robots.txt that prevented Googlebot from revisiting the page.
This scenario highlights an important SEO concept that many websites overlook: Google must crawl a page before it can process NOINDEX and remove the URL from search results.
Continue reading “Why Google Was Not Removing Our NOINDEX URL – A Hidden Robots.txt Issue”
