For every page that you are monitoring Conductor Website Monitoring checks whether it's indexable or not. The indexability status of a page is displayed, and for non-indexable pages also the reason for being non-indexable are displayed.

How Conductor Website Monitoring determines indexability

For a page to be indexable the following criteria have to be met:

• Indexing must not be disallowed by the "meta robots" directive
• Indexing must not be disallowed by the "X-Robots-Tag" HTTP header directive
• The URL can't be inaccessible to robots through a Disallow-directive in the robots.txt file
• The page's canonical link must point to itself or be absent

Common mistakes with canonical links

The canonical URL needs to match exactly with the actual URL. Often we see a close mismatch between the canonical URL definition and the actual page URL. Common mistakes:

• Not using the same protocol (HTTP and HTTPS)
• Not on the same sub-domain (example.com and www.example.com)
• Not having the same casing (URLs are case sensitive)
• Not having a trailing slash in one of the two definitions

See our Academy article on Duplicate Content to learn more about this.

Indexability and the impact on auditing

Conductor Website Monitoring understands that not all pages are meant to be indexable, and to prevent you from getting false positives when it comes to page auditing we automatically ignore the following auditing tests on non-indexable pages by default:

• All issues in the Meta Information category
• All issues in the Content Headings category
• The Image missing title-attribute issue

You can easily override this by unignoring the tests for the Non-indexable segment.

Duplicate content tests

When testing for duplicate content, Conductor Website Monitoring takes the following criteria into account:

• Only indexable pages can cause duplicate content issues
• Paginated pages cannot cause duplicate content issues