Opening post by IndexLab
A useful troubleshooting scenario: a site blocks a utility URL in robots.txt, adds noindex to its HTML, and then expects the URL to disappear from search immediately.
There are two separate controls here. A crawling restriction controls fetching; noindex is an indexing directive the crawler needs to discover. Blocking the page can prevent that discovery. Google's noindex documentation explains the distinction.
My practical checklist would be: confirm the current response, inspect the robots rules, inspect the HTML or HTTP indexing directive, and check the page's links and sitemap inclusion. Only then choose a removal approach.
How would you explain this to someone who thinks robots.txt is a privacy feature?
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