Hello,
Thank you for contacting Rank Math and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.
That is completely normal. Please do not worry about that as your blog page still won’t be indexed if you have selected the noindex option for it.
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
Hello Michael,
Unfortunately, your reply does not answer my question about whether the RankMath sitemap detects and honours a ‘noindex’ setting. I don’t know whether that would be a reasonable expectation, but by inference, I’ll take it that it doesn’t.
As I said in my question, I did not knowingly add the ‘noindex’ meta tags and I assume it’s WooCommerce that’s inserting them.
It’s difficult not to be alarmed by a Submitted URL marked ‘noindex‘ report. As PepperLand Marketing and many others say “Don’t send Google mixed messages”, which strikes me as very sensible.
In consequence of the above, I have turned off the sitemap in RankMath and installed the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. This plugin allows me to give ID’s of pages not to include in the sitemap. I’ve requested Google to retest the site and hope for no more red errors from them.
Perhaps RankMath will enhance their sitemap capability in future to give an ability to exclude certain pages? Or does it already do that and I’ve missed it?
Regards,
Barry
Hi Barry,
Apologies if I failed to address this concern in my previous response.
Sometimes the noindex option from WC is not honored but you can easily fix this by heading over to the affected page and manually setting noindex via the “Advanced tab” on the Rank Math metabox.
I am however passing on this feedback to our dev team so that this can be improved in future updates.
I hope this helps. Thank you.
Hi Michael,
Thank you for your suggestion. As you may appreciate, for those not steeped in SEO, sitemaps and meta tags, all the options can be overwhelming. I will now do a test to see if a consistent (no Google aggravation) sitemap is produced.
Obviously, if I can remove Google XML Sitemaps and achieve a good result using RankMath, then fewer plugins is better.
Regards,
Barry
Hello Again Michael,
Yes, setting noindex via the Advanced tab of the Rank Math metabox for the affected pages does the trick. Thank you.
Along the way, I see that there is also a way to, presumably, achieve the same outcome by entering the post ID’s in the Exclude Posts field of the General tab of Sitemap Settings (the assistance there saying that it actually applies to posts, pages and custom post types).
So it seems that Rank Math does have it all covered. But you do need to dig for the answers and can’t just install and forget, attractive as that is as a course of action.
Regards,
Barry
Hi Barry,
1. Rank Math can only detect the noindex if it is set using Rank Math itself. If you manually noindex something or use any other plugin – Rank Math will not be able to detect the noindex tag. I can understand this may seem like a limitation but the alternative would be to check for the noindex tag from the source code which would quickly turn into a nightmare for websites with a huge number of articles and page views as this would be resource-intensive.
2. I am sorry but we should have told you about the exclusion option from the get-go. We will make sure to do that from now one. I appreciate your feedback in this matter.
There are a lot of options in Rank Math and we have a KB that covers each and option as well. You can check it here: https://rankmath.com/kb/
Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.
