Google is reportedly working on fixing a bug with not being able to properly respond to a noindex directive on some JavaScript generated pages. This is happening for some React apps using Single Page Applications (SPAs) that have the noindex directive on them but Google is not picking it up and thus indexing pages that should not be indexed.

This issue was spotted by Mark Williams-Cook, the Director at Candour and Founder of AlsoAsked, a popular SEO tool. He posted about the issue on LinkedIn and said, “Here’s a screenshot of over 9,000 “noindex” pages being indexed. Adding ‘noindex’ via JS can be a solution, but it’s absolutely not reliable.”

Here is that screenshot from Google Search Console’s indexing report:

He later shared that Google is now aware of the issue and is working on fixing it. “I spoke to Googlers about this and it is a bug they are working on fixing,” he wrote.

Mark went on to explain that this is an example of a React app that has a meta “noindex” added via JavaScript, but the pages are nevertheless getting indexed.

Martin Splitt from Google did speak in the past about noindex meta and JavaScript pages and sometimes, Google does have a hard to processing them. But these days, Google shouldn’t be challenged by them. I guess in this case, Google was?

Again, I suspect in this case, Google fetched and rendered the page prior to the JavaScript executing the noindex meta data. So Googlebot didn’t see the noindex directive yet. This can happen, it is rare, but this can happen and obviously did happen. Google has warned about this before, including using JavaScript to generate structured data in some cases.

Mark’s solution was to use CloudFlare to serve the noindex directive prior to the JavaScript executing its own meta data (which is served in the HTTP header), but that was only after he found out Google was not picking up on the first solution he had. Mark wrote, “With some Single Page Applications (SPAs), it can be difficult to have control over what is shown before the JS is executed. In this instance, I managed to get the pages to set a “noindex” before JS was rendered by using Cloudflare Transform rules.”

So if you noticed this issue as well, hopefully Google will patch it up and if not, look for an alternative solution – like Mark did.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

It seems that Google made a change, intentionally or unintentionally, to the site command within Google Image Search. When you do a basic site command, without appending keywords to the query, then Google will return no image results.

Here is a screenshot:

I spotted this via Kunjal Chawhan on X over the weekend and pined Google about it but I did not hear back as of yet.

I did notice that when you append a query to the end of the site command, it does return results:

I suspect this is a bug but what do I know…

Forum discussion at X.

Google is now showing a blue map pin with a city name under some of the search result snippets. This seems to be rolling out now and seems to be new. It shows you if a specific website is near you or in a specific city, I think.

Here is what this looks like for me:

You can see it shows a blue map pin, followed by a city’s name, then the distance to my location, and then if the store is open or not.

I spotted this via Rafa Martin on X and Punit on Mastodon who live in different regions and shared different screenshots.

Here they are:

Have you seen these before? They may not be new but I received two notifications about this feature this morning, which is unusual.

Forum discussion at X and Mastodon.