Hi,
If your categories and tag archive pages were previously set to ‘index’ and were already showing in the search results, and then you’ve just recently set it to ‘noindex’, it can take some time before Google is able to recrawl those pages, check for the updated information, and then eventually decide to remove it from the search results.
You can learn more about how to ‘noindex’ a post or page here — https://yoast.com/help/how-do-i-noindex-urls/
Could you provide us with one sample URL of one of your category or tag archive pages so we can check if the output from the Yoast SEO plugin is correct?
@milindsahu Thanks for your reply and for providing the link.
We reviewed the page in question and unfortunately do see that this page is not set to noindex as the robots meta tag is appearing in the source code as the following (see image here):
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1" />
If you clear your cache (server, plugin/theme, or CDN such as Cloudflare) does this resolve the issue? If you are not sure how to clear your server cache you should speak with your host provider.
After clearing the site’s cache, you can then check whether the page is then outputting the expected robots meta tag of noindex by viewing the page’s source code and then searching for ‘robots’.
If the issue still persists after clearing the site’s cache, we would next recommend checking to make sure the robots meta tag is set to noindex for the page/post in Yoast SEO, and you can check this setting by performing the following actions:
• In WordPress, go to the Edit screen for a page/post
• Scroll down to the Yoast metabox
• Click on the ‘Advanced’ area
• For ‘Allow search engines to show this Page in search results?’ make sure this is set to ‘No’
* Note (setting this value to Yes will set meta robots to index and setting No would set meta robots to noindex)
In addition, you can set pages/posts to be indexed by performing the following actions:
• In WordPress, go to SEO>Search Appearance>Archives or SEO>Search Appearance>Taxonomies
• Set ‘Show in search results’ to ‘No’
• Click ‘Save Changes’
We also have a guide available on how to set a page/post’s meta robots tag to index/noindex here: https://yoast.com/help/how-do-i-noindex-urls/
We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.
