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Crawlmind
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Rule site.canonical.target-noindex

Canonical target is noindex

site.canonical.target-noindex is a check in Crawlmind's site audit that grades high-impact issues of this kind. This page explains why the rule matters and the exact fix.

Impact: highEffort: lowFixable: 1-click

Why it matters

Page A says "the canonical version is page B" and page B says "do not index me." This is a self-contradiction Google explicitly flags as an error: the canonical signals "index this URL" and the meta-robots signals "do not." The result is unpredictable: sometimes neither page gets indexed, sometimes the noindex wins and the original page disappears too.

The fix

Two ways to fix, depending on which signal you actually want:

**If you want page A indexed under page B's URL:** remove the noindex from page B.

```html
<!-- page B head -->
<!-- WAS: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> -->
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
```

**If page B should genuinely never be indexed:** remove the canonical pointing to it. Page A then becomes its own canonical (or points elsewhere).

```html
<!-- page A head -->
<!-- WAS: <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/b"> -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/a">
```

Whichever you pick, the canonical target and its indexability directive must agree.

References