The woes of the web designer

[telophase]

Google: You want to stop robots indexing your site? Disallow them in robots.txt!
Also Google: That won't stop us from indexing your those pages, of course, and complaining when they don't meet our standards.

Google: But remove them from robots.txt and put a noindex meta tag in the header and it'll stop us!
Also Google: runs validate fix function Nope, sorry, those pages with the noindex meta tag still don't meet our standards.

Comments

[selenite0]

Pity there's not an undocumented Google-f-off tag.

[telophase]

Yup.

I ended up ignoring the "this is not fixed!!11!" message from the Google search console fix validation thing, on the basis that theoretically the pages in question should drop out of the index after being crawled again, and told my boss that. If it doesn't work, then the next time Google emails about issues, it'll no longer be my problem. :)