@eliot1988
Yes, it’s generally okay to index categories and tags, and it’s a common practice in many WordPress installations. They can help provide structure and context for your content, which can help search engines understand your site. However, whether you should index them or not depends on the specific structure and content of your site.
If your tags and categories contain unique, valuable content that’s helpful to your users, then they could be beneficial to have indexed. But if they’re just duplicating content that’s found elsewhere on your site, they could potentially lead to issues with duplicate content.
If you’ve decided that you don’t want your tags and categories indexed, you can indeed use an SEO plugin to add noindex tags to these pages. This tells search engines not to include these pages in their indexes.
Once you’ve added the noindex tags, it may take some time for Google and other search engines to crawl your site again and update their indexes. However, eventually they should respect the noindex tags and remove these pages from their indexes.
To speed up this process, you can request Google to re-crawl your site using the Google Search Console. Just keep in mind that it may still take some time for the changes to take effect, as it depends on how frequently Google crawls your site.
Remember to think carefully about this decision, though. If your tags and categories are providing value to your users or helping with your site’s SEO, you might not want to remove them from search engine indexes. It’s usually a good idea to consult with an SEO expert before making these kinds of changes.
Thank you very much!! You helped me a lot! Be well!
