Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and bringing your concern to our attention. I’m sorry for the delay and for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.
From the links you shared, most of them are paginated URLs. However, those are already set to noindex.
To figure out how Google is discovering those URLs, you should use the URL inspection tool of your GSC account to check the URLs and check the referring page where are they coming from.
You can track those URLs via the referring page to determine how Google crawled them.
Hope that helps.
Thank you.
Thank you very much! That is a really useful information. But is it best practice to noindex paginated URLs? And what should I do that only the main category is indexed?
Greetings Kathrin
Hello,
Sometimes it is recommended to noindex your paginated pages to prevent duplicate content issues and optimize the crawl budget. But if you think your paginated pages are unique and can add some value to your SEO then you can set them to index and if you do that, Rank Math will automatically add the rel=next/prev tags to your paginated pages to help search engines understand the relationship between the pages.
So, it fully depends on you and the circumstances of your website if you want to set your paginated pages index or not.
However, in order to index only the main page, not the paginated pages, we have options Noindex Paginated Single Pages and Noindex Subpages in Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Misc Pages. It looks like these options are already enabled on your website as we can see the paginated pages are already set to noindex on your site.
Hope that helps and please don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any other questions.
Thank you.
Hello,
Glad that helped.
Please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need any other assistance.
We are here to help.
Thank you.
