Google not indexing pages

Okay, I think I’ve solved this, and the problem IS with Rank Math.

I have tested this on several URLs in the group Google alerted me about in Search Console as being marked “noindex.” In the URL Inspector, I check the page and it says it’s not indexed because it has a robot meta of “noindex.” I go to the URL, check the source code, and now I’m seeing this (which wasn’t showing when this initially happened):

“<meta name=”robots” content=”follow,index,,none”/>”

I go to the page in WordPress’s backend. Sure enough, it’s one of those with absolutely nothing in the Advanced tab under the post:

I check the box beside Index. I flush my cache and check my source code and now it says:

“<meta name=”robots” content=”follow,index”/>”

As it should. I check it in Google’s URL Inspector again, and just like that, it’s indexable.

So Rank Math is generating that strange robots meta when nothing is chosen in that box, and Google “thinks” that means “noindex.” And the only immediate solution I have is to manually check every single box on every post ASAP. It seems like this might be something you could change on an update – somehow make sure that nothing other than “noindex” can put out a meta tag Google will read as “noindex”, or maybe give us an option to globally “index” all our posts (I would assume most of us don’t have a lot of posts we noindex).

One of my sites validated last night, but with The SEO Framework. I manually changed all entries (and have the RSI to show for it this morning) and will let you know if ever Google suddenly reads pages as “noindex” again. But they used to have no robots meta, and now they have the correct robots meta, so I assume this is solved by the work I did checking the boxes.

My other site has not finished validating yet, and I switched back to Rank Math on it. I also checked all the boxes on it, so the source code has the right meta tag on it. I anticipate they’ll validate just fine, and I will let you know when it happens.

I hope you’re able to reproduce the issue or at least come up with a workaround. Since not everyone seems to be having this trouble, it may be something went wrong when I imported settings from my previous SEO plugin. I can tell you it didn’t seem to be a plugin conflict – turning all others off didn’t change the meta tags.

I cannot seem to replicate this on my end and thus this could be something that did not go right during the import process.

That’s unsettling and makes me wonder if I should continue to rely on RankMath. The pages have validated, but ONLY after I manually checked “Index” in the settings for each and every post on the website.

I linked to another thread in the first post of this one, in which that person was having the same problem. It may well be something going wrong during the import process, but I think you should stop telling people they don’t need to check the “Index” box.

Thank you! I think that change would help a lot. Sometimes with plugins, there are so many unpredictable ways they may react with other plugins and themes that the best option is a workaround to prevent the problem in the future.