Category and Tag No Index

Hello, I’m sorry to hear that you’re experiencing this issue. If you’ve already set the category and tag pages to noindex in Rank Math, but they are still being indexed by search engines, there are a few additional steps you can take to address this.

Firstly, it’s important to ensure that the changes you made in Rank Math have been saved correctly. You can double-check this by navigating to Rank Math SEO → Titles & Meta → Global Meta → Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives and confirming that the settings are still enabled.

If the settings are correct, you may want to clear the cache on your website and wait for Google to recrawl your sitemap. This can help ensure that the updated noindex settings are recognized by search engines.

Additionally, you can also check the Index Status under Rank Math SEO → Analytics → Index Status tab to get real-time data on the status of your pages and their presence on Google. This can help you identify if the changes have been recognized by search engines.

If you’re still facing issues after taking these steps, please feel free to reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will be happy to assist you further. Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

Sources:
How to Fix the Submitted URL Seems to Be a “Soft 404” Error » Rank Math
Fix Excluded by NoIndex Tag – Google Search Console Status » Rank Math
Is Your Site the Victim of Internal Site Search Spam? » Rank Math
How to NoIndex Paginated Pages » Rank Math
How to Optimize a Category Page » Rank Math

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to this issue.

It seems that you’re currently using the Rank Math PRO plugin, but the account you have used to open this ticket is the Rank Math free version.

Can you please search and forward a receipt from FastSpring.com so we can locate your account and verify it?

We can confirm that the tag page in the screenshot is set to noindex. You can also disallow category and tag pages from the robots.txt so that bots and crawlers do not crawl them at all. Add the following rule to your robots.txt:

disallow: /category/
disallow: /tag/

While it is Google’s prerogative to remove your category and tag pages from SERPs, there are two other things you can do:

#1. You can use the Google URL Inspection Tool to request a recrawl of your website. This will tell Google to re-fetch your website data and update accordingly. You can find the tool here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289#request_indexing

#2. Temporarily block the URLs from Google Search (This is a quick fix). Here is how You can go about it. Go to your Google search console
https://search.google.com/search-console/
The URL must be in a Search Console property that you own (select the correct domain property)

• Open the Removals tool.
  https://search.google.com/search-console/removals?utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=1663419
• Select the Temporary Removals tab.
• Click NEW REQUEST.
• Select Temporarily remove URL
• Enter the URL
• Select Next to complete the process.

The request usually takes up to a day to process and is not guaranteed to be accepted. Check back to see the status of the request. If your request has been denied, click Learn more to learn why.

Please refer to this article to learn more about this temporary removal: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9689846?hl=en#zippy=%2Cclear-cached-url%2Ctemporarily-remove-url

We hope this helps. Please let us know if you have further questions or concerns.

Thank you.

Hello,

We are hopeful as well.

We are here if you need further assistance.