Links: Non-Indexable Page Inlinks Only

Indexable pages that are only linked to from pages that are non-indexable, which includes noindex, canonicalised or robots.txt disallowed pages.

Pages with noindex and links from them will initially be crawled, but noindex pages will be removed from the index and be crawled less over time.

Links from these pages may also be crawled less and it has been debated by Googlers whether links will continue to be counted at all.

Links from canonicalised pages can be crawled initially, but PageRank may not flow as expected if indexing and link signals are passed to another page as indicated in the canonical. This may impact discovery and ranking.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Links’ tab and ‘Non-Indexable Page Inlinks Only’.

To populate this filter ‘Crawl Analysis’ must be performed via ‘Crawl Analysis > Start’.

The pages that are non-indexable and link to the pages in this issue can be viewed via the ‘Inlinks’ tab.

Export in bulk via ‘Bulk Export > Links > Non-Indexable Page Inlinks Only’.

Robots.txt pages can’t be crawled, so links from these pages will not be seen. Robots.txt disallowed pages will only be reported if ‘ignore robots.txt but report status’ is selected via ‘Config > Robots.txt’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when indexable pages are only linked to from pages that are non-indexable, including those marked with noindex, those that have been canonicalised to other pages, or pages disallowed by robots.txt.

For example if a page on the following website:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page1/

Was linked to from one page:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page2/

But https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page2/ had a meta noindex tag.

How To Fix

Ensure you link to important pages from indexable pages to avoid any uncertainty in discovery, indexing and ranking.

Consider whether the non-indexable pages linking to these pages should be non-indexable.