The page leaves the index in days
A noindex is honoured quickly. By the time the traffic drop is obvious in analytics, the page has been out of search for a week.
Indexing rules monitoring
Danger
One stray noindex takes the page out of Google
The meta robots tag controls whether a page can be indexed and whether its links pass equity. A single accidental noindex — copied from staging, or set by a plugin during a routine update — drops the page out of search within days.
Danger severity: you get the alert within the hour, not in tomorrow's digest.
What it may cost you
Nothing else on the list has a faster path from “everything looks fine” to “the page is gone from search”.
The site gives you no symptom
The page loads, internal links work, the layout is intact. There is nothing to notice until organic traffic collapses.
Two tags combine in ways you did not intend
When more than one meta robots tag is present, search engines merge them restrictively. The result is easy to misjudge and rarely what you wrote.
How an alert reaches you
Three steps, running every day, on something nobody looks at twice a year.
1
Every run
Baseline stored
The first crawl saves the meta robots value on each monitored URL as it should be. That value is what every later run is compared against.
2
Next morning
Change detected
The content attribute of <meta name="robots"> is extracted and compared, checking there is exactly one of it.
3
Within the hour
Alert in your inbox
Danger-level findings go out right after the crawl batch. Milder ones wait for the daily digest, so the urgent one stands out.
You decide what counts as broken
The stored value is your desired state, not a guess. When a later run differs you get both versions side by side — and if the change was intentional, one click adopts it as the new baseline.
Severity matches the damage
This one reaches you within the hour, because the damage starts before the next digest would arrive. Every test's severity can be overridden per site, so your inbox stays useful.
Set it once, then leave it
Pick the frequency and the user agent Wygard should send, switch on JS rendering if your pages need it, and the rest needs no attention.
What we check
One check on every monitored URL where a meta robots tag is found, in Basic and on by default.
| Test | What it catches | Scope | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta robots | The value changed, the tag was removed after a template refactor, or a second one appeared. | URL · Basic | Danger |
Questions about indexing rules monitoring
What the checks do, and what they don’t.
What about the X-Robots-Tag header
The header-level equivalent is on the roadmap. Today this check covers the HTML meta robots tag.
Can I be alerted only on noindex
Yes. The match method lets you watch for an exact value, for a value containing a string, or for the tag not existing at all.
Which URLs get the check
Every monitored URL where a meta robots tag is found, enabled by default and included in Basic.
“This app has completely transformed how we manage our SEO. The real-time alerts ensure we never miss an issue. It's a game-changer for protecting our rankings!”
Why Wygard?
Trust, but verify. You build the site — Wygard makes sure your key SEO elements work as intended.
Your SEO protected
How quickly would you notice if your canonical tags changed? We catch it for you.
Time saved
Don't waste time on massive crawls and endless data. With 15 years of hands-on SEO experience, we know how to focus on what really matters.
Easy to Use
You don't have to be an SEO expert — your site still deserves expert monitoring. That's exactly what our tool delivers.
Single site or the whole portfolio? We can handle all today
Every online business deserves protection. No matter the size.