I have the correct settings in the search appearance -> Archives -> Author Archives
The archives are set to ‘on’. The ‘Show author archives in search’ are on as are the ‘show archives for authors without posts’.
I have tried deactivating other plugins but the only one that makes this disappear is when yoast is deactivated.
I confirm that ‘Search engine visibility’ is not ticked under ‘reading settings’
I have no other SEO – based plugin on the site (in fact it is happening to all three of my sites.)
The base category for the authors are /dealer/
I can confirm that the drop-off in landing page visits to author pages through Google happened from the middle of November. This coincided with the rollout of 19.10 on 8th November where: “The following hooks have been deprecated: …Yoast\WP\SEOdmin_author_archives_meta….”
I have a dev site that you could access if required.
Many thanks
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
The author sitemap is important to us but, because my theme uses a bespoke user role and capability that Yoast does not recognise, I have to use PublishPress Capabilities to add the user to the author sitemap by giving them two Roles (the Theme’s one and ‘contributor’).
I have tested with this plugin turned off on the dev site and the spurious noindex tag still remains until I deactivate the Yoast plugin.
The reason that the A&M user was not in the sitemap was because the extra ‘contributor’ step had not been carried out (it has now).
I can confirm that we are redirecting /author/ to /dealer/* but not for all users (we have different grades of users)
Looking at the sitemap, user accounts that were added after June 2022 appear as /author/ in the sitemap, whereas those added before appear as dealer. If I edit and save a user, then they become /author/ in the sitemap (I want them to say dealer as this is what is actually the URL) .
Two changes in Yoast SEO 19.0 that relates to sitemaps are making the sitemap available to Bing and adding the Yoast-generated XML sitemap URL to the robots.txt file. I’ve checked, and this is correctly implemented for your site.
By the way, I still don’t see https://www.truckpages.co.uk/dealer/a-and-m-commercials/ in the sitemap; that’s definitely due to the noindex tag. Can you edit the user/author and ensure that Do not allow search engines to show this author’s archives in search results is unchecked?
I can see the https://www.truckpages.co.uk/author/a-and-m-commercials/ in the sitemap. I can confirm that Do not allow search engines to show this author’s archives in search results does not even exist for my installation – there is no Yoast box at the bottom of the page as with other types.
All of the author (dealer) accounts shown in the sitemap have the same issue, it is not just this one, so feel free to try any of them listed.
To summarize:
Problem 1: Sitemap shows /author/ instead of /dealer/ in sitemap
Problem 2: The noindex tax on every dealer (author) page.
I’m still figuring out your setup and what’s responsible for the noindex tag; I understand with a noindex tag, the URL shouldn’t be in the sitemap. Deducing from what you mentioned, I assumed dealers/authors are user accounts found in WordPress > Users > All Users; is this correct?
The issue might be between Yoast SEO, PublishPress Capabilities and Redirection plugin. Unfortunately, I’m unable to replicate your setup and re-create the issue at my end. Troubleshooting the issue further will involve taking a closer look at my setup which we can’t do on a public forum. You may consider purchasing a Yoast SEO Premium subscription that involves email support.
I assumed dealers/authors are user accounts found in WordPress > Users > All Users; is this correct?Yes This is correct
I can confirm that the issue is still there with both Redirection and PublishPress turned off. It is only when Yoast is turned off that this appears.
I am not happy buying a licence for a product that does not work on my site, I might be better buying a licence for a different product that does work?
I have discovered a workaround for the noindex issue but still do not have an answer to the sitemap dealer-> author renaming issue.
I have added the following to the functions.php file:
//Removes the Yoast noindex on author pages and makes it index add_filter( ‘wpseo_robots’, ‘yoast_seo_robots_remove_author’ ); function yoast_seo_robots_remove_author( $robots ) { if ( is_author() ) { return null; } }
You mentioned redirecting /author/ to /dealer/ with the Redirection plugin. However, by design, when a 301 redirect is created with a third-party plugin, this isn’t included in the Yoast-generated XML sitemap.
I am not using the redirection plugin for this but ‘Combo WP Rewrite Slugs‘ which is a rewrite instead of redirection. I am struggling why the earlier ones were included in the sitemap as /dealer/ and later ones not included. Something has changed with the Yoast plugin as the other plugin was not changed at this time?
We’re not familiar with that plugin so we’d recommend reaching out to the developers/support team of that relevant plugin and see how that can work in combination with Yoast SEO.
…Or delete yoast and move onto a different plugin. That plugin hasn’t changed, Yoast has. I spent time setting Yoast up and it was working. Now it is not. That’s a shame that I have to do it all over again with my sites with a different SEO plugin. Thank you for all your help!
