SEO monitoring: know the day a page stops being indexable

No. An indexability change is informational. The notice goes to the contacts subscribed to the monitor's Up alerts, is never sent as a voice call, and never marks the monitor as down. The page is still serving visitors when it turns noindex, so treating it as an outage would train people to ignore the alert. You read it during the working day and fix the release that caused it.

Because a notice reports a change, and the first check has nothing to compare with. The first run records what the page looks like - its robots directives and its canonical - as a baseline, and sends nothing. From the second check on, any difference from that baseline produces a notice that shows the value before and after. To see the current state straight away, run the free noindex checker or canonical checker against the same URL.

Not today. It reads what the monitored page itself says: the robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header and the canonical tag. Robots.txt rules and sitemap membership are checked by the scheduled crawl monitor, which cross-checks every crawled page against both on each run, and by the free robots.txt tester for a single URL. If you only need to know that robots.txt is reachable, an ordinary HTTP monitor pointed at the robots.txt URL covers that.

A check that cannot be read as a web page leaves the baseline alone and sends no indexability notice. That covers non-HTML responses such as PDFs or JSON, truncated bodies and error status codes. An error status is still an outage for the monitor itself, so it alerts through the normal Down path. Once the page answers with HTML again, the comparison resumes against the last good baseline, so a brief error never produces a pair of false change notices.

No. The checkers and the monitor read the HTML and headers exactly as the server returns them, which is also what a search engine sees on its first fetch. If your robots tag or canonical is injected by client-side JavaScript, it will not appear in the result. That is worth knowing on its own: a directive that only exists after rendering is one the crawler may or may not honour.

A one-off crawl tells you what the site looks like today. The scheduled crawl runs the same walk every week by default, keeps every run, and reports what changed since the last one - pages that became noindex, canonicals that moved, links that broke - together with a health score from 0 to 100 and the issues behind it. Each run fetches up to 500 pages from one location, waiting between requests so it stays polite to your server, and the results arrive as a weekly site-health digest.

For a one-off answer, run the free noindex checker: it fetches the page the way Googlebot does and reports the robots meta tag, the X-Robots-Tag header and the canonical it found, so you see immediately whether the page is allowed into the index. Whether Google has actually indexed it is confirmed in Search Console's URL inspection. To make sure it stays indexable, turn on the Indexability option on the page's HTTP monitor and you will hear the day a noindex or a canonical change ships.

The Indexability option on HTTP monitors is included on the Solo, Business and Enterprise plans. It is not part of the free trial or the Webmaster plan. The scheduled crawl monitor is in beta and enabled on request: write to [email protected] with the site you want crawled. The three checkers - noindex, robots.txt and canonical - are free and need no account.