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Ubersuggest service is highlighting certain URLs on my site that have robots meta tags blocked. The URLs relate to pages that show summaries of blogs on my site with a link to the blogs.
The pages relating to the URLs do not appear in the menus. I didn’t know which plugin in WordPress was creating the pages concerned. I asked Ubersuggest Support how I find out which plugin is creating the pages and how to get the pages indexed. Here is an example of a page: https://naturalwellnesssolutions.org/2023/06/
Ubersuggest Support suggested I check the page source to see which plugin was creating the ‘no index’ instruction. I did and discovered that it was Rank Math:
<!– Search Engine Optimization by Rank Math – https://rankmath.com/ –>
<title>June 2023 – Natural Wellness Solutions</title>
<meta name=”robots” content=”follow, noindex”/>
<meta property=”og:locale” content=”en_US” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:title” content=”June 2023 – Natural Wellness Solutions” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”https://naturalwellnesssolutions.org/2023/06/” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”Natural Wellness Solutions” />
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image” />
<!– /Rank Math WordPress SEO plugin –>I ran the wizard in Rank Math again and changed some settings, which I thought would stop the ‘no-index’ creation, but it’s still there.
How do I stop Rank Math from doing this?
By the way, do you have any idea about which plugin might be creating the summary pages? They aren’t appearing in the site menu.
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Hello,
We apologize for the inconvenience you are facing with Rank Math. It seems that the pages you mentioned are being marked as noindex by Rank Math, which is causing them not to appear in search engine results.
To stop Rank Math from adding the noindex tag to these pages, you can follow these steps:
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Go to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Rank Math SEO → Titles & Meta → Misc. Pages.
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In the Misc. Pages section, you will find the Noindex Paginated Single Pages option. Please ensure that this option is disabled to prevent the noindex tag from being added to these pages.
If you have already tried this and the issue persists, please let us know so that we can further investigate and assist you accordingly.
Regarding the plugin creating the summary pages, it’s possible that a theme or another plugin might be generating these pages. You may want to review your installed plugins and themes to identify the one responsible for creating these pages. If you need further assistance with this, please feel free to reach out to our support team, and we will be more than happy to help.
If you have any other questions or need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask. We’re here to help!
Sources:
How to NoIndex Paginated Pages » Rank Math
Rank Math Sitemap Issues and Their Fixes » Rank Math
Is Your Site the Victim of Internal Site Search Spam? » Rank Math
How to Fix Submitted URL Marked ‘NoIndex’ Error » Rank MathHello,
It is a pretty common mistake to open the page source and search for a
noindextag to see if the page is marked as noindex or not.However, Rank Math offers a No Index option in the admin menu bar, which could show up in the page’s source code when logged in like the codes you have shared.
Please note that the actual noindex tag is added like this:
<meta robots="noindex">To ensure that your post/page is set to index, you should refer to this section in your page’s source code:
Hope that helps.
Hello,
Apologies for the confusion earlier,
The URLs relate to pages that show summaries of blogs on my site with a link to the blogs.
By the way, do you have any idea about which plugin might be creating the summary pages? They aren’t appearing in the site menu.
There are various types of WordPress pages, and one of these is the archive page. The archive page displays a list of posts organized by date, category, or tag. Organizing your content with archive pages makes it easy for readers to find what they’re looking for. If you regularly publish many posts, archive pages can make it easier for users to find the articles they’re looking for without navigating through a long list of posts.
Note that archive pages usually served thin content that resulted in a soft 404 and we usually suggest that they should be set to
noindex.Here is an example of a page: https://naturalwellnesssolutions.org/2023/06/
The URL you shared is the date archive page of your posts. Date Archives are pages that WordPress creates, organizing your content by the dates they were published. Date Archives are useful only in certain situations, and on most websites, they should be disabled.
Another example of an archive page is https://naturalwellnesssolutions.org/category/essential-oils/. This is a category archive page.
To disable the date archive page completely, please navigate to WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Misc Pages and click on the ‘Disable’ box.
When you disable Date Archives, they don’t disappear from your website. They are redirected to your homepage instead.
However, if you don’t want this behaviour, you can go ahead and enable it. We guess this is the current setting on your website.
To set this archive page to
index, please navigate to WP Dashboard > Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Misc Pages and set the Date Archives Robots Meta asIndex. Once done, wait for Google to crawl the URLs again and the issue should be resolved after that.As we mentioned, date archives are useful only in certain specific scenarios. Even if you decide to use them, you will face a duplicate content problem. To avoid that problem and to keep your crawl budget efficient, we would recommend that you
noindexyour date archives.Please check these articles for your reference:
https://rankmath.com/blog/how-to-archive-wordpress-posts/#what
https://rankmath.com/kb/titles-and-meta/#date-archivesHope the explanation helps to clarify the issue and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need my assistance with anything else.
Thank you
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