noindex + nofollow: double-blocking and how to fix

What it means

The page has both a noindex directive and a nofollow directive, which together tell Googlebot to skip indexing the page and to ignore the links on it. This means the page won't appear in search results, and any link equity flowing through it won't pass to the pages it links to. The issue surfaces when a page is meant to rank but is being blocked from both discovery and visibility.

Why it matters

When noindex is set, the page is excluded from the index even if Googlebot crawls it. When nofollow is also present, Googlebot doesn't follow the links on that page, so link equity from other pages pointing here doesn't flow outward through this page. This compounds the problem: the page itself is invisible, and it stops being a conduit for authority to other pages it links to. For AI agents and crawlers that parse the same signals, the page is effectively quarantined.

How to fix it

1. Remove the noindex directive from the page's meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag header.
2. Remove the nofollow directive to allow link equity to flow through the page.
3. Verify the page returns a 200 status and is not blocked by robots.txt.
4. Request a reindex via the URL Inspection tool or submit the page in a sitemap.

When it's not a problem

This is a false alarm when the page is intentionally archived, such as a tag page with thousands of low-value URLs, or a staging page that shouldn't be public. It is also acceptable when you deliberately want a page to exist but not contribute to ranking or pass link equity.

How common is it?

1300 audited sites in our corpus currently show this issue. The breakdowns below show which platforms, gatekeepers, verticals and countries are most exposed.