Why would a noindex page appear in SERPs?

Hi all! I did a site: search for a client site. Some of the listings are pages that are noindex.

It wasn't a newly noindexed page and I did submit it for removal to Google.

Have you seen this before?

Cheers!
Barb

 

you’ll need to use noindex in your theme header along with PHP (assuming you using php) to control which pages it appears on. Are you using any tools to set those pages that you want noindex? Also using sitemap helps.

 

Using SEOPress for Wordpress.
When I inspect the page, it shows noindex.

 

I would recommend using YOAST.

 

Couple of possibilities.

1) It was indexed before the noindex tag was added to the page.
2) A rogue bot ignored the noindex tag and Google did not catch it.

The noindex tag relies on the HONOR SYSTEM. Most indexing bots, BUT NOT ALL, will honor a noindex tag. If the page is too critical to be publicly indexed then it needs to be password protected which FORCES all indexing bots to ignore it.

 

I agree with @mmerlinn
If a page is too critical, password protect it.
noIndex, noFollow, all these tags are simply tags, search engines may or may not respect them, does not guarantees anything.

 

If its so much important to you that the page remain undetected from the rest of the world then just block it from .htaccess file

 

Are these pages linked within your website?. Google might not be seeing the no index tag because it isn't crawling it recently. Check the latest cache date, do you see the noindex tag in Google's cached version? Otherwise, how long was a while ago. As with anything SEO, it can take time.

 

Because they were indexed first when google bot came to your site
make them noindex and then submit your sitemap again .

 

Thanks all. It's not critical it be protected from the world so I'll skip the password bit.

It's likely that it was indexed before noindexing. And sitemap index has been resubmitted so it seems like it's a wait and see thing.