Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to change noindex to index?
-
Hey,
I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.'
How can i change this so my pages get indexed?
I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated..
Please let me know
Many thanks, Jamie
P.s Im using WordPress 3.5
And i have the XML sitemap plugin
And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..
-
Answered below as well, but wanted to drop this here in case anyone else is looking. WP has changed the location of what used to be "Privacy" under settings. The functionality (which blocks search engines from your wordpress installation) is now under Settings->Reading
[Screenshot](Hi Mark Did you find it? I struggled too for a bit, but it's moved to Settings->Reading See this screenshot -Dan)
-Dan
-
Hi Mark
Did you find it? I struggled too for a bit, but it's moved to Settings->Reading
-Dan
-
Just updated it to this: http://gyazo.com/4a8a008055abbd563f96bf29b6b259a6.png?1357651763
And then checked my page sources and they're still 'noindex' - why can't i correct this?!
-
Just installed it and now its added this field into my settings>Reading
http://gyazo.com/0be601793fc1cb866d918ea61e7d8ec1.png?1357649141
What do i need to change to allow it to index all my pages?
(Don't want to type something in that will block all my pages
)
-
Just asked the WordPress Forums and one of their reply was to install this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-robots-txt/
Just seems to add the privacy tab again so i can set the settings to: I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers
Like you first stated
Will install it now and see how it goes
-
It could be that the older wordpress had a setting that this new version has decided to ignore. This is typical of programmers!
The next possibility is to look in the database, but the options part of the database is hard to read.
Another idea is to look in the code of the the theme and hack it, so it is permanently index, follow or just remove that altogether.
Maybe someone else has a better idea?
Alan
-
If i remember correctly my pages were still not being indexed before i installed the all in one SEO pack.
Here is my settings for the SEO pack: http://gyazo.com/6b4dddacb307bdacfdd7741894e0356b.png?1357647136
As you can see they are as you explained.
Any other ideas?
-
Yes, I would have them indexed in that case too.
I think it is the categories that are noindex.
I think this is an 'All in one SEO pack' adjustable feature.
In the setup for that, look for a checkbox:
"use noindex for categories"
uncheck that if it is checked.
If that isn't it, I don't know the answer
-
Thanks again for your reply Alan.
Currently the site is still in its final stages of development and once my automated system is finally built and implemented then I won't need to be changing any of the index pages except posting a few blogs once in a week or so.
So i think it would benefit me more to have each of my index pages getting indexed but then again I'm not sure on how to go about allowing them to be indexed due to WordPress' update.
My plugins are all highly downloaded and i use the 'All in one SEO pack' - if that may be the problem? I've gone through all the settings and the noindex buttons are all anticked.
Perhaps it could be the initial theme i used?
-
Thank you Mark
Nice looking site!
Your front page is index, follow.
Index pages are noindex, follow
Final pages are index, follow
I do something very close to this on my site.
Often, index pages are useless to searchers, because the index page changes so quickly that by the time the info gets into a search result, the information is no longer on that page, and the searcher will either just click away, cursing you and your site, or they will go looking through a few index pages and then curse you when they can't find what they wanted.
So I agree with the way you're doing that - if it is the case that the content changes quickly. If the index pages are just collectors of groups of items, then index, follow would be better, provided that you have enough text on the page to make it worthwhile.
As to how to make that happen, it isn't obvious.
I need to upgrade some of my sites to 3.5.
It could be that you have a plugin or a "custom field" that sets the index follow.
I suggest you edit a post and a page and scroll down to see if you have a field that handles it, such as "robotsmeta" that is set to "noindex,follow" for those pages
-
Hi Alan, thanks for your quick response.
My website is: www.FifaCoinStore.com
Here is a printscreen of my settings: http://gyazo.com/0cd3d21c5ec1797873a5c7cacc85a588.png?1357600674
I believe since the WordPress 3.5 update they have removed this privacy option which is why i can't seem to find it. I read this page from WordPress on it: http://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Reading_Screen
Or am i just looking in the wrong place?
Thanks again
-
Hello Mark.
Please send me a bitly shortened link to your website so I can see what you are seeing
It probably isn't your robots file.
First try this.
In the Admin section, you should see "Settings" on the left navigation
Click that and you should see "Privacy"
Click that and you should see two radio buttons
<label for="blog-public">I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers</label>
<label for="blog-norobots">I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors</label>
Obviously, choose the top one and save it.
Then, refresh your front page or inner pages and look in the code to see if it still says noindex
If you have a cache, you will need to flush it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Discovered - currently not indexed issue
Hello all, We have a sitemap with URLs that have mostly user generated content. Profile Overview section. Where users write about their services and some other things. Out of 46K URLs, only 14K are valid according to search console and 32K URLs are excluded. Out of these 32K, 28K are "Discovered - currently not indexed". We can't really update these pages as they have user generated content. However we do want to leverage all these pages to help us in our SEO. So the question is how do we make all of these pages indexable? If anyone can help in the regard, please let me know. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | akashkandari0 -
Should search pages be indexed?
Hey guys, I've always believed that search pages should be no-indexed but now I'm wondering if there is an argument to index them? Appreciate any thoughts!
Technical SEO | | RebekahVP0 -
Dynamically Inserting Noindex With Javascript
Hello, I have a broken plugin creating hundreds of WP-Content directory pages being indexed by Google. I can not access the source code of these pages to add a noindex to them. The page URL's all have the plugin name within them. In order to resolve the issue, I wrote a solution with javascript to dynamically add in a noindex tag to any URL containing the plugin name. Would this noindex be respected by Google and is there a way to immediately check that it is respected? Currently, I can not delete the plugin due to issues with it's php. If you would like to view the code: https://codepen.io/trodrick/pen/Gwwaej?editors=0010 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Sitemap_index.xml = noindex,follow
I was running a rapport with Sreaming Frog SEO Spider and i saw: (Tab) Directives > NOindex : https://compleetverkleed.nl/sitemap_index.xml/ is set on X-Robots-Tag 1 > noindex,follow Does this mean my sitemap isn't indexed? If anyone has some more tips for our website, feel free to give some suggestions 🙂 (Website is far from complete)
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO2 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Should i Noindex my privacy policy page?:
Hi, We have a privacy policy page but it can be found at Copyscape and might affect Google Panda content farming. My questions is, should i Noindex my private policy page?:
Technical SEO | | chanel270