Using Disallow and Noindex Together: Errors and Solutions

🚨 What Happens if Disallow and Noindex are Used Simultaneously?

If you want to completely remove a page from Google’s index, using the noindex and disallow directives together incorrectly can be a major mistake.

✅ Correct Approach:

1. Add a noindex tag to the page and allow search engines to access it.
2. Verify in Google Search Console that the page is crawled with “noindex” and removed from the index.
3. You can use disallow to block crawling in order to optimize your crawl budget.

❌ Incorrect Implementation (Error Scenario)

• If a page is both tagged with noindex and disallowed via robots.txt, Google will not be able to crawl the page.
• Because it cannot crawl the page, the noindex tag will not be seen and Google will not remove the page from the index.
• As a result, Google may continue to index the page, and you might see an error message in Search Console stating: “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt.”

🔎 A Real-Life Example:

When I performed a site:domain.com search on a website, I noticed that some pages, despite being tagged with noindex, were still indexed. The reason was that the pages were disallowed in the robots.txt file, completely blocking bots from accessing them.

📌 Conclusion:

👉 First, allow Google to access the page so that it processes the noindex tag, and then use disallow!

👉 Otherwise, your pages might not be removed from the index as expected, and your SEO strategy could be negatively affected.