Cool! Thanks Gaston! I'm glad I asked about this! ^_^

Whoooooooaaaaahhhhhh! that fixed it! what's the deal!? lol. why is this method instantaneous and the other method I was pointed to by google is taking months?....do I have to do this with each individual URL?

....or maybe that's what it found the last time it was crawled? I clicked the "request indexing" button.....we'll see what happens.

hmmm. it says:

Indexing allowed? No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag....but I have the settings in yoast set up to allow indexing.....do you think maybe changes in yoast settings aren't applying retroactively?....

They're in google search console, but I have tried searching for a couple of them and they don't appear to be indexed :-(. I tried the method you suggested and that didn't bring up anything either.

Hello! I did something dumb back in the beginning of September. I updated Yoast and somehow noindexed a whole set of custom taxonomy on my site. I fixed this and then asked Google to validate the fixes on September 20. Since then they have gotten through only 5 of the 64 URLS.....is this normal? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be doing.

Thank you! ^_^

....actually, I didn't know about the "page%%" at the end of several of my google snippets.....looks like I messed that up in Yoast too . Thanks for catching that one ^_^

Lolol. Roman, I really appreciate all of the work you're putting into this. You are sending me a lot of really useful information. But none of it is answering any of my questions lolol. You're meta answering my question :-p. You're telling me about all of the issues that are caused by my problem, which we are aware of....we just need help with the problem.

I'm aware of the category meta issues and the titles being off. They are like that because I am currently trying to find an answer to the question I am posting this thread for:

The way my site is set up requires me to have categories and custom taxonomy to function. I am using the categories for blog posts and the custom taxonomy for listings. Both need to address the same issues, ie category: ADHD and cust. tax: ADHD.

1. Is this a problem for google? Can it tell the difference between a blog archive and a listing archive based on the content rather than the category or cust. tax title?
   2)Would it be best for me to just noindex my blog categories even though they contain useful content?

You had suggested noindexing the blog archives, which is what I am thinking too, I just really want to be sure before I do it. I think I just have to come to terms with the fact that my blog has useful content, but the reason I want people to find my site is for listings....does that seem like sound reasoning?

I feel like I should put all of this in context again. My site has only been live for 4 months. It is ranking in the first two pages of google for over 200 of the 900 keywords we're tracking. Our category pages are messed up right now because I am trying to figure out this issue and because I made a big mistake a couple of months ago and noindexed all of the listing archives x_x. Given all of this, I think we're doing pretty well so far.

....I guess one of my other hesitations about noindexing the blog categories is the fact that google has not finished processing my request to fix my noindex mistake. Right now it has only processed 18 of the 80 URLS I submitted for validation a little over a month ago....I'm worried that if I noindex my blog categories right now then I will lose a lot of ranking.....What do you think? if I go this route of noindexing the categories should I wait till google finishes validating the corresponding custom taxonomies?

Thank you for your help!

I'm wondering if I'm right to assume that google will be able to tell the difference between these two on its own and despite their category titles, will see that one is about a topic and the other is about therapists who work with that topic.

Hi Roman, Thanks again for the in depth answer! ^_^...I think I probably should have mentioned in the beginning of my post that I have pretty much been a 20+hour/week SEO for the last 4 years. I'm familiar with crawling and crawl budget. I've just never made a directory before or anything that included custom taxonomy. We have spent a lot of work on our site structure and feel like its pretty good for what we need. The issue is just the conflict between categories and custom taxonomy. I know we really should have a better hierarchy with broader categories and then tags, but we could only really think of 2 possible parent categories: basically diagnoses and not diagnoses....but 98% of our blogging content revolves around diagnoses/therapeutic issues.

1. my understanding is that google will choose the page it thinks is most relevant and index that one, not ignore competing pages and list none of them.

2) "As I see you have a blog and also have a listing pages you can use the custom taxonomies for listing and categories for the blog"
-yes. This is what we have done. and this is the problem we are trying to sort out, because our categories and custom taxonomy overlap and/or are similar. We'd be open to canonical tags or redirecting the blog categories to the custom taxonomy pages, but that really feels like we would be losing something. The blog archives and the listing archives offer distinctly different content to users....aside from the fact that listing archives also contain the most recent 6 blog posts in their relevant category.

3. We've done everything you've mentioned in #3....just not in a super great way because we couldn't really think of parent categories :-p.

so given all of the previous information. Do we need to change things? can google handle the categories and custom taxonomies if one for example is ADHD and the other is ADHD counseling? Do we need to noindex the blog archives?....I can't really think of another solution if this is truly an issue.

.......I mean how do other people do this? lets say you have a shoe store and it contains custom taxonomy for types of shoes for sale, but you also have a blog that needs to talk about different types of shoes.....if you have a blog archive about sneakers and a custom taxonomy for sneakers that you're selling.....how do you distinguish these for google?