WordPress Archive Page NoIndex warning from Google
I turned on my phone this morning and was greeted by an ominous email from The “Google Search Console Team,” with the seeming dire warning…
Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 Page indexing issue(s). The following issues were found on your site.
Top Issues
- Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag
We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search.
They provided me with a link to the console where I was told that the page davidfrancis.org/2023/02/ would not be indexed by Google because it contained the meta tag “noindex.” I brought up the page, looked at the source, and sure enough, it was there.
<meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow' />While few people know what meta tags are, I am keenly aware of them due to my work as a webmaster since 1995.
Meta tags are HTML elements that provide information about a web page to search engines and other software that crawls the web. They typically include a page’s title, description, and keywords, and can also specify things like the author, language, and character set of a web page. Meta tags are not visible to users, but can affect how a web page is indexed and displayed in search results.
Since I’m not writing the code, I had to do some digging to figure out how to solve this issue. My new hosting company includes Yoast SEO with all of my websites, and I know Yoast is adding a bunch of meta tags to my posts to help Google bring me readers. What I didn’t know is how to set the robots meta tag on archive pages.
So I Googled it and Yoast says I needed to make some changes to my settings…
- Click “Yoast SEO”
- Click “Settings”
- Click “Advanced”
- Click “Date Archives”
- Select to activate, “Show date archives in search results.”
I refreshed the source view and saw it was changed!! WooHoo!!!
Back on the Google Search Console, I selected “validate fix” and the page is now queued for indexing. Problem Solved!
