(Entry was posted by Micah Fisher-Kirshner on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/25/2018).

X Robots Tag

Client implemented an X Robots Tag noindex on pages that 301 redirect to another page.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Michael Martinez: I don`t think the crawlers will see both the redirect and the noindex. Is the X-Robots tag generated by the redirect code itself? If not I think it`s just a redirect.
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Michael It`s generated by the raw header of the page, (something caught by link research tool plugin) and figured I`d check if it really mattered.
Michael Martinez: Micah Fisher-Kirshner Well, I guess Fetch As Googlebot would be the deciding factor. If you see the noindex in the headers of whatever Googlebot sees, then I would get rid of the tag just to be sure.
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Michael Martinez Just to double-check here`s what I`m seeing in GSC:Fetch: https://www.domainA.comDownloaded HTTP response:HTTP/1.1 301 Moved PermanentlyContent-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8Location: https://www.domainB.comX-Robots-Tag: noindexObviously for DomainB.com, it`s index via X-Robots-Tag
Michael Martinez: I think I would remove the tag.
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Thanks.
Eric Wu: I`ve never seen this before. But I`ve seen pages with noindex then canonicalize to another page and pass the noindex. So if similar logic holds true, it`s possible depending on the reconciliation methods or process.
Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Eric yeah, then I realized I might have an opposite problem where a global x robots tag index might conflict with an on page noindex.It`s been that kind of week