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I have page with list of products and product details pages. list page must be invisible in google search results and product details must be visible in google search result. I have the following meta tag added to the product list page, but nothing is indexed.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">

Google’s John Mueller said that the ‘noindex,follow’ command in the meta tags of a web page will eventually be interpreted as a ‘noindex,nofollow’ command.

That is not surprising. If Google does not index a page, it cannot follow the links on the page. Here’s John Mueller’s statement:

“It’s tricky with noindex, which I think is something of a misconception in general within the SEO community. With a noindex and follow it’s still the case that we see the noindex. In the first step we say ‘okay you don’t want this page shown in the search results’. We’ll still keep it in our index, we just won’t show it and then we can follow those links.

If we see the noindex there for longer than we think this page really doesn’t want to be used in search so we will remove it completely. And then we won’t follow the links anyway. So noindex and follow is essentially the same as a noindex, nofollow. There’s no really big difference there in the long run.” see more

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  • Do you link your product detail pages together? If every one of your products links to 10 other products you wouldn't need category pages for SEO linking.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jan 31, 2018 at 2:56
  • "That is not surprising. If Google does not index a page, it cannot follow the links on the page." That does not make sense. Indexing or not indexing a page is not the same as crawling / not crawling a page. I find this is often mixed up, for instance when people make adjustments to the robots.txt, assuming that forbidding to crawl a url in robots.txt that has accidentally been indexed would deindex the page - that is often not the case. It just means the page won't be recrawled.
    – tentaclequing
    Feb 2, 2018 at 19:57

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you could create a sitemap file that lists all your product details pages and submit it to google from the search console.

how to build and submit sitemap to google : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183668?hl=en

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  • An XML sitemap may not help. They are not usually good at getting pages indexed that wouldn't otherwise be indexed. See The Sitemap Paradox
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Feb 1, 2018 at 13:51
  • Thank you for the link I was not aware. It's very annoying indeed.
    – Atarax
    Feb 1, 2018 at 14:08
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    Its worth a shot though. A sitemap never hurts and they are easy enough to make.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Feb 1, 2018 at 14:18

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