Pages randomly riddled with NOINDEX tags, which I didn't put there...

Hi all, 

This is driving me crazy, so I'm praying someone has actionable advice to give. 

I have a website published, which we've been working on a lot this past year, so many pages were visited again and again, then checked on Search Console to request indexing (we fine-tuned some URLs to better accommodate SEO guidelines) 

My issue is that for some reason my pages are randomly showing a NOINDEX tag, which disables Google's crawlbots, which in turn excludes my pages from Google searches. 

I have NOT implemented the NOINDEX tags either by code, or by the built-in settings under "SEO" (The one where you can hide the page from Google's crawl bots) I haven't even clicked on them by mistake for a second. 

Also these sites aren't the ones we edited the URLs for. My example now is a page we created from the ground-up, published and since then has been showing this NOINDEX issue. 

I have reached out to squarespace support on multiple occasions, but they, and I don't like to throw shade, were absolutely useless. Their sole reaction being that they don't see the noindex tag, when I sent them a screenshot of Search Console's code snippet clearly showing the tag. (first screenshot)

I'm at a loss. Is this a technical issue with Squarespace sites in general?
Or did I screw-up somehow? 

Currently this page is experiencing this issue: 
https://www.mokointerior.com/artistic-wall-composition-series

I also saw a report from Search console that I didn't really understand (second screenshot):

"robots.txt has disabled Google bot "
But I have no clue what these URLs are, like 

https://www.mokointerior.com/api/census/RecordHit

tried it, but it just downloaded an empty document file. I have no idea what this is, probably some automatically generated site, like "sitemap.xml"?

Thanks in-advance for anyone who can weigh-in!

Cheers!
David

UPDATE: 

For some reason now it's saying a different error. 

Now the issue is "Can't access robot.txt file" (or "can't find it" - sorry for the hungarian screenshots) 

Apparently no NOINDEX issues are present (or the robot.txt error triggers sooner) 

I'm guessing then that this is my fault. But I still don't have a clue. I didn't edit the page, I did absolutely nothing with it, since my post was published. 

The reason you may be getting the noindex issue on the example issue page you provided is there is a custom code redirect, that redirects you and on the redirected to page the is a meta robots noindex tag.

The crawler is apparently triggering this redirect and so you get the search console report.

What might be done.

I'd be tempted to do a desktop and mobile version of the page using an Index page and some CSS to show/hide the the appropriate subpages of the index based on a media query. I think if you search this forum you may find many threads on this particular technique. This method would eschew the redirect code you have now.

If you still want to use the redirect code you might want to replace your check with the JavaScript matchMedia instead. I don't know if it will improve things but the matchMedia is a better fit for this kind of check.

Let us know how it goes.

Hi there, 

I am currently getting these error messages on my website I built with square space www.artsportcollective.com

I am not technical so am wary of messing around to much could you give some advice on how I can resolve this issues.

Thanks very much in advance 

Joe

Hi @joefarren. Many of the indexing messages in GSC are informational vs errors. You'll want to look at the URLs listed to see if you think they should be indexed.