High impact · weight 10 · worth up to 1.9 points of the total score
A noindex directive removes the page from search entirely. It is the most damaging single line on a page, and it is nearly always left behind by accident after a staging deploy.
Remove noindex from <meta name="robots">, or narrow it to the pages that genuinely should stay out of the index.
Check a page for this, and the other 75 checks at once
Page has a title
The <title> element is the headline Google shows in search results and the label the browser puts on the tab. A page without one is listed under a machine-picked fallback that nobody chose.
No noindex in the X-Robots-Tag header
X-Robots-Tag does the same job as the robots meta tag but travels in the HTTP response, so it is invisible in the page source. A page can look perfectly indexable while the server quietly forbids it.
Page has a meta description
The meta description is the snippet under the title in search results. Without one Google assembles a snippet from whatever text it finds, which is often a navigation menu or a cookie banner.
No insecure subresources
An https page that pulls scripts, styles, or images over http has those requests blocked or downgraded by the browser. Layout and behaviour break with no server-side error to show for it.
