Blog category page indexation

[eric611]

Hello!

All the category pages of my blog posts are set to no indexation (I'm using Yoast SEO). They don't appear in the sitemap. The only links that are in the sitemap are the actual blog posts and the contact and the about page.

However, if I search after a certain keyword, I can see the category page in the SERP on the 4th page. And it's been over 3 weeks since I set them to no indexation.

Does it usually take longer for all the category pages to disappear from indexes? If not, what is the problem?

 

[Ryuzaki]

It takes Google several crawls to believe you'd want to do something like no-index your category pages. The problem is that you're likely linking to it from the main menu on every single page on your site, which tells Google that you think it's an important page. So they're not sure what to believe.

To answer your question, it can take as many crawls as Google needs to believe it, and that can take varying amounts of time depending on your crawl budget, which is typically based on your page rank score per page.

I've had the same issue getting them to drop 404's out of the index, which is why I recommend using 410 errors instead, which seem to work faster because you can't accidentally produce a 410 error. You do it intentionally and it means "we meant for this to be permanently gone".

I must say that I understand why you did it, I think, but that you're not going about it the right way. My recommendation is to keep page 1 of categories indexed (but never tags or date archives, which I wouldn't even recommend using). Then page 2 and forward (called "paged" pages) can be noindexed. You can spruce up page one with some static, unique content at the top and bottom if you wish to help them out.

There's some code you can use to pull this off that I've posted. Let me see if I can find it... I can't, but here's one @Darth posted that looks correct:

<?php if ( is_paged() ) { echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />'; } ?>

That would go in your header. You probably want something which would go in your functions.php, which is what I shared. I can't find it but you can Google it and find something similar for sure if you want.

 

[Darth]

I've had the same issue getting them to drop 404's out of the index, which is why I recommend using 410 errors instead, which seem to work faster because you can't accidentally produce a 410 error. You do it intentionally and it means "we meant for this to be permanently gone".

Handy hint, thanks.

Also, I now index all category pages and tag pages. Driven mainly by this article. Opinions on it welcomed.

 

[gunnar]

Code:

// Set Sub-Pages of Archives to Noindex
function ryu_noindex_paged()  {
    if ( is_paged() ) {
        echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
    }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'ryu_noindex_paged');

I think this was what you were looking for.

 

[bmoney]

Hello!

All the category pages of my blog posts are set to no indexation (I'm using Yoast SEO). They don't appear in the sitemap. The only links that are in the sitemap are the actual blog posts and the contact and the about page.

However, if I search after a certain keyword, I can see the category page in the SERP on the 4th page. And it's been over 3 weeks since I set them to no indexation.

Does it usually take longer for all the category pages to disappear from indexes? If not, what is the problem?

If it's not too many of them you can do a manual request for removing from GSC

 

[Ryuzaki]

If it's not too many of them you can do a manual request for removing from GSC

That doesn’t truly remove them from the index. It just temporarily hides them for 6 months (I think).

Unless you meant requesting them to be crawled, which can help. Another option is to create a sitemap of the pages you want gone and upload that, which will trigger them to be crawled, and then you can even watch the progress in the coverage report.

 

[bmoney]

That doesn’t truly remove them from the index. It just temporarily hides them for 6 months (I think).

Unless you meant requesting them to be crawled, which can help. Another option is to create a sitemap of the pages you want gone and upload that, which will trigger them to be crawled, and then you can even watch the progress in the coverage report.

Yes, you are right that it hides them for 6 months, but since they are removed (set to no index) they will be recrawled after 6 months and they won't be restored to index, and it's kind same as they were instantly removed. At least its works for me that way.

Sitemap trick is not bad option though if there is a lot of them