Pagination

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us and bringing your concern to our attention.

Please note that the canonical URL is only required if the pages are going to be indexed on Google. Since you want to add the noindex and nofollow attributes to these pages, there is no need to add any canonical URL.

Rank Math also only includes the canonical URL to the pages that are set to index.

However, you can set the paginated pages to Noidex from WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Miscellaneous Pages:

In case, you want to use both Noindex and nofollow attributes, you can use the following filter code on your website:

add_filter( 'rank_math/frontend/robots', function( $robots ) {
    
    if ( (is_category() || is_tag()) && is_paged() ) {
        $robots['index'] = 'noindex';
        $robots['follow'] = 'nofollow';
    }
    
    return $robots;
});

Here’s how you can add filter/hook to your WordPress site: https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Let us know how it goes. Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

There’s no option in Rank Math PRO to set the canonical of your pagination to the first page.

However, to set the canonical to the first page, you can use this filter on your site:

add_filter( 'rank_math/frontend/canonical', function( $canonical ) {
	if ( is_paged() ) {
			$link = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
			$arr = explode('/page/', $link,);
			$canonical = home_url($arr[0]. '/');
		}
		return $canonical;
});

And here’s a guide to adding the code to the website:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/

Hope that helps.