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Rule · Canonicalization

noindex and robots.txt are not used to choose canonicals

SEO-CANON-07C2 Recommended· w4

Class
C2 Recommended
Weight
4
Severity on fail
major
Applies to
Google

Test this rule on a live site with the noindex checker or the canonical tag checker. Free, no account needed.

Scope and evidence

Evaluated on fetched pages with a head canonical that differs from their own URL. The book marks this requirement DOCUMENTED RECOMMENDATION, SEARCH-ENGINE-SPECIFIC.

Fail conditions

Each condition has a stable code and a reason template. The evaluator fills the placeholders from observed values only; no sentence in a report is generated.

  • noindex_with_cross_canonical

    {url} carries noindex and also names {target} as canonical. Google advises against using noindex to choose a canonical, because it will completely block the page from Search.

  • target_noindex

    {url} names {target} as canonical, but {target} carries noindex. Google advises against using noindex for canonicalization, because it will completely block the page from Search.

  • target_disallowed

    {url} names {target} as canonical, but robots.txt disallows {target} for Googlebot ({rule}). Google advises against using robots.txt for canonicalization.

The documented fix

Consolidate duplicates with a 301 or a canonical to a crawlable, indexable URL.

Sources, quoted

These are the passages the rule rests on, stored once in the knowledge base and emitted exactly as written. A citation marked for specific conditions appears only on findings with those codes.