How to find every noindexed page in WordPress

Step by step

1. Rule out the site-wide switch

Go to Settings → Reading. If Discourage search engines from indexing this site is ticked, every page is noindex, nofollow and nothing else matters until you untick it. The Dashboard's At a Glance box shows Search engines discouraged when this is on.

2. Check post type and taxonomy defaults

Open Hydrogen SEO → Robots. The Post Types and Taxonomies tables show a Noindex switch per row. A switch that is on hides every entry of that type or every archive of that taxonomy. Note which are on, and confirm each one is deliberate. Author and date archives are set separately on Hydrogen SEO → Titles & Meta → Archives, where author archives default to No index.

3. List individual posts with the SEO filter

On Posts → All Posts, pick No index from All SEO and click Filter. Repeat on Pages and on each custom post type's list. The filter includes posts with their own noindex setting and posts that inherit it from their type, so the count here is the real number of hidden entries. Combine it with the Published view to ignore drafts.

4. Tell overrides from defaults

Hover a row and click Quick Edit. The Indexing field tells you which case you are looking at. Default (no index) means the post follows its type. No index means someone set it on this post. That difference matters for the fix: a default is changed once on the Robots screen, an override post by post or with Bulk Edit.

5. Look for noindex that WordPress did not set

A page can be hidden by something outside the plugin. Test a suspect URL from a terminal:

curl -sI https://example.com/pricing/ | grep -i x-robots-tag
curl -s https://example.com/pricing/ | grep -io "<meta[^>]*robots[^>]*>"

The first line shows a noindex sent as an HTTP header by the server, a CDN rule or a security plugin. The second prints every robots meta tag in the HTML. Two tags mean two tools are printing one each, and search engines follow the most restrictive.

6. Compare with Search Console

In Search Console, open Pages and click Excluded by 'noindex' tag. Export the list and compare it with what you found. URLs that appear there but not in your WordPress filters are usually search results, feeds, or pages that are no longer noindex and have not been recrawled. The reverse case, a page you noindexed that Google has not noticed yet, simply has not been crawled since the change.

7. Fix the accidental ones

For a page that should be indexed, set Indexing to Index or Default in Quick Edit, purge your cache and confirm the tag in the source. Then use URL Inspection → Request indexing in Search Console so Google does not wait for its next scheduled visit.

Pages that are always noindex

Some pages are noindex by design and will never appear in the filter, because they are not posts: internal search results, the 404 page, and with the default settings author archives. Hydrogen SEO applies noindex, follow to search results and the 404 page as built-in rules. Empty category and tag archives are noindex too while Noindex Empty Archives is on under Titles & Meta → General.

Without the plugin

Core WordPress has no per-post noindex, so on a site with no SEO plugin the only sources are the Reading setting, custom code hooked to wp_robots, and server headers. Search the active theme and any custom plugins for wp_robots and noindex, and test key URLs with the two curl commands above. If the site recently changed SEO plugins, the old plugin's per-post settings may not have been carried over; see switching from another SEO plugin.