Hello,
We apologize for the issue you are facing with unnecessary items being indexed. To prevent certain pages from being indexed, you can use the No Index directive. Here are some common scenarios where you might want to apply No Index:
-
WordPress Archive Pages: These pages often do not add value for search engines and can create duplicate content issues. If you have archive pages that you don’t want indexed, it’s best to set them to No Index.
-
Temporary Pages: If you have promotional or seasonal landing pages that are not relevant long-term, applying No Index can keep them off search results.
-
Irrelevant Pages: Pages like ‘Thank You’ pages or subscription confirmations can clutter search results and should be set to No Index.
-
Duplicate Content: If you have multiple versions of similar content, using No Index can help signal to search engines which version should be prioritized.
-
Sensitive Information: Protect sensitive or restricted content from being publicly exposed by applying No Index.
You can manage these settings directly in Rank Math. For detailed guidance on how to implement these changes, please refer to our Advanced Tab in Rank Math SEO’s Meta Box.
If you need further assistance, please reply to this ticket, and a human agent from the Rank Math Support team will take over and provide more specific help. Thank you for raising this concern!
This is an automated reply from Rank Math Support Bot. Your ticket has been assigned to a human agent and we will get back to you shortly.
Hello,
Those URLs are set to index in the source code.
You may follow our guide here on how to set them to noindex:
https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-noindex-urls/
Looking forward to helping you.
Does it fall under category archive or attachment ?
Hello,
Based on the content, it seems that those URLs are attachment pages.
When you upload a media file to the WordPress Media Library, WordPress creates a separate media attachment page for each file, and having the attachment pages as “noindex” or redirecting to the parent page is actually the preferred method to handle those and we mention the same here:
https://rankmath.com/kb/should-you-redirect-attachments/
In essence, this means that there’s nothing to worry about the attachment pages as the images from the website can and will still be indexed, it’s just the attachment pages, which don’t hold any SEO value, that will not get indexed.
Looking forward to helping you.
Thanks for the reply.
I also notice the robots.txt file is being indexed. Should it be index in the first place ?
Hello,
The robots.txt file is not meant to be indexed by search engines as it’s primarily used to provide crawling directives to search engine bots. To ensure it is not indexed, you can add the following directive to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /robots.txt
Since the file is already indexed, you can request its removal from Google Search Console. You can refer to this guide: 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.
