Google Search Consile Error - Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’

 

Sitemaps are important from SEO perspective. If you have installed the WordPress plugin Google XML Sitemaps, and you have submitted a link to Google via the Google Search Console, you might receive an email from "Google Search Console Team " saying that "your site is affected by 1 new Coverage related issue - Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’". Here is how to resolve it.




The email from "Google Search Console Team " reads:

Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 new Coverage related issue. This means that Coverage may be negatively affected in Google Search results. We encourage you to fix this issue.

New issue found:
Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’

• Click on "Fix Coverage Issues".

This will open Google Search Console page and the error with an example of the affected link is displayed.

• Copy the URL and open in a new browser tab to see the page. 

It will probably be the page https://yoursite.com/sitemap.html

• Right click in any blank area and click "View Page Source" 

In the header area in the page source, there would probably be a META tag like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/>

According to this resource, the above META declaration means:
The spider will not look at this page but will crawl through the rest of the pages on your website.

To resolve the issue, do the following:

• Login to WordPress as administrator
• Navigate to Settings > XML-Sitemap
• Disable / uncheck "Include sitemap in HTML format" and save.

• Go to the Google Search Console page previously opened
• Click Validate Fix

• Google will start validating your Coverage issue is fixed or not.

You will also receive an auto email informing you about the validation being initiated.