Improper no-index tag being applied - rankmath needs to fix - Support

Resolved Alex Furfaro
6 months ago

Rank Math free

This isn’t a ticket I guess but something broken with the tool. Your “top admin bar” in role manager is setting pages to no-index by mistake. It doesn’t happen to all pages on a site but some.

I was alerted by this from Google search console as over 100 pages on a client site were all of a sudden no indexed, including some of our service pages. I checked all no-index settings in rankmath on the page itself, in the dashboard, general wordpress visibility, and more, and couldn’t find out what was going on.

I control+F in the source and found this line “id=’wp-admin-bar-rank-math-no-index’ … href=’#noindex’>As NoIndex”, found the setting to turn off the admin bar in the role manager, and refreshed the page. Control + F again and the code was gone.

NO, the setting in the admin bar for “marking page as no index” was NOT checked.
This was also undetectable from any crawling tools like screaming frog.

This is a bug and likely hurting a lot of sites.

Here is an imgur picture link of what was happening: https://imgur.com/a/2HaKk45

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

RankBot
6 months ago
Hello,

We apologize for the issue you are facing with the no-index tags being improperly applied. Thank you for bringing this concern to our attention. It sounds like a frustrating situation, especially with the impact on your client’s site.

From your description, it seems that the Rank Math settings are not reflecting correctly, which can indeed lead to unexpected no-index tags being applied. Since you’ve already checked various settings and found that the admin bar option was not checked, this could potentially be a bug.

To further investigate this issue, we recommend replying to this ticket with any additional details you might have, including the specific site URL where this is occurring. A human agent from the Rank Math Support team will be able to take over and assist you more effectively.

In the meantime, you can also check the following:
1. Ensure that there are no conflicting plugins that might be affecting the no-index settings.
2. Review the Titles & Meta settings in Rank Math to confirm that no default no-index settings are applied.
3. Check if there are any caching mechanisms that might be serving outdated versions of your pages.
Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to resolving this issue for you!
Adetayo
6 months ago

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us, and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

You’ll notice at the WP Admin top bar when you are viewing any page of your website that there is a Rank Math icon that provides shortcuts to options available in the Rank Math settings and tools.

Part of the shortcut available is the option to quickly mark or set the page you are viewing as “No Index” or “No follow” as shown in the image below and also in the screenshot you shared earlier and the screenshot shared by my colleague.

What you see when you are viewing the source code of your webpage is the HTML output of the wp Admin top bar.

This does not set the webpage or your entire website with the ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’ tag.

You can view your website or the webpage in incognito mode or view the page when you have signed out of your WordPress dashboard to confirm this.

To assist in further investigating this, could you please provide a screenshot of your Google Search Console’s Page Indexing Report?

To share the screenshot, you can use a tool like https://imgur.com/. This will allow us to better understand the situation and provide the appropriate support.

Hope this clarifies the issue for you, and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

Thank you.

Alex Furfaro
6 months ago

Rank Math free

Hello,

I have updated the sensitive data as requested. Can you please check further?

Thank you.

Alex Furfaro
6 months ago

Rank Math free

Unfortunately, this HAS caused pages to deindex. I linked the URLs and an image in the sensitive information we exported data from search console.

I checked all the settings, this was the only thing on the page that said “noindex.”

Yes, some of these are set to no-index now, but the dry needling page, herniated disc, our story, etc – all of those are primary pages that are in the menu. There would have been no reason for us to noindex those.

Reinelle
6 months ago

Hello,

The URLs you shared are already set to index.

Please note that the actual noindex tag is added like this in your source code:
<meta robots="noindex">

In this case, please clear your website’s cache and revalidate the issue in your Google Search Console account, and give Google some time to recrawl your site.

Looking forward to helping you.

Alex Furfaro
6 months ago

Rank Math free

That’s exactly my point, they are set to INDEX but Google deemed them to be set to “Noindex” and started removing them from the search engine. I’ve checked for plugin conflicts and other reasons why Google would have prompted the message in search console about the pages being no-indexed but I can’t find anything else. I’ve been doing SEO for 8 years, I’ve checked and double checked everything, I had my developer look, neither of us could find a reason why this would have happened.

Rakibuzzaman Siam
6 months ago

Hello,

We can see some pages are actually set to Noindex, but the pages like candida-yeast-overgrowth/ and why-take-supplements/ are properly set to index, and Google can also see the same. Please check the screenshots in the sensitive data section for your reference.

Since Google is still showing the wrong status on your GSC account, the only way to fix this is by clearing your website cache and revalidating the issue.

In this way, Google will recrawl the page and will update the status on your GSC account.

Regarding the Noindex and Nofollow in the Rank Math Top Admin Bar, Google will never see this, as it is only available when you’re logged in to your website. Also, it is not added as a robots meta tag, which Google will count.

But if you still want to remove this, you can simply disable the Top Admin Bar option from the Rank Math > Role Manager settings.

Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

RankBot
5 months ago

Hello,

Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.

If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.

Thank you.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

The ticket ‘Improper no-index tag being applied – rankmath needs to fix’ is closed to new replies.