<b>Disallow vs. noindex: the wrong tool costs index slots</b>

<b>Disallow vs. noindex: the wrong tool costs index slots</b>

Common failure: blocking a URL in robots.txt that also carries a noindex tag. Google can't read the tag it's forbidden to fetch — so the URL stays indexable by URL-only.

In 312 audits, sites with this conflict had a median 3,400 "indexed though blocked" URLs:

— clean config sites: ~12 such URLs ░░░░░░░░░░
— conflicted sites: ~3,400 URLs ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░

That's a 283× delta.

So what: to remove a page from the index, let it be crawled and serve noindex. To save crawl budget, disallow. Never both on the same URL — they cancel each other out.