Meta robots noindex on events page

Hi @dumel,

That’s the default for event archives where no events are listed (and at this time it doesn’t look like you have any upcoming events).

You should find that once you begin populating your calendar with upcoming events that meta tag disappears/stops indicating that the page should not be indexed.

Does that help?

Hi @barryhughes-1,
Thank you for the reply. I see yes, the client has no events currently scheduled. But there is other copy on that page that should be indexed. In fact that page should always be indexed. Our SEO software is reporting this as “a critical issue” that may negatively influence rankings. Google does not want to be excluded from any pages these days, whether there is much content on or not. So would it be possible to override or change that feature at all?

You can override this with a snippet like the following, just add to your child theme’s functions.php:

add_filter( 'tribe_events_add_no_index_meta', '__return_false' );

I believe that this the decision to add noindex to these pages is because Goole can end up running away with and indexing thousands of pages that contain no events and can result in many soft 404s — that being said, I understand that SEO needs can be different for one person to another, just wanted to let you know!

Take care,
Ed ??

Hey there,

Since this thread has been inactive for a while, I’m going to go ahead and mark it as resolved. Don’t hesitate to create a new thread any time you help again!

Ed ??

I’m having the same issue. My home page is not indexing because Google says “No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag”.

I followed the advice above and edited the funtions.php file, and, sure enough, the meta tag is no longer showing up on the page source.

HOWEVER, Google still returns the same error… What gives???

Also, even before I changed the code, the metatag was showing up even when there were plenty of events in the calendar, so the original explanation didn’t seem to make sense, either.

I tried a different theme, also…same problem.

Please help!

If you are using Yoast SEO in combination with Modern Tribe Events calendar, I do, in general, personally recommend adding the snippet mentioned above to functions.php:

add_filter( 'tribe_events_add_no_index_meta', '__return_false' );

I believe the logic behind adding noindex tag to the main events page is to prevent so-called “spider traps” where bots crawls every iteration of your events page – filtered views, date-based pages, etc… This indeed is not great for SEO.

However, if you are using Yoast SEO, Yoast adds a canonical link tag to your Events page which makes the noindex tag less necessary.

For example:

https://www.domain.com/events/

Has a canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.domain.com/events/" />

AND these views have the same canonical tag:

https://www.domain.com/events/2019-02/
https://www.domain.com/events/month/?tribe_eventcategory=38

This tells Google that the canonical version of the page is https://www.domain.com/events/, and that is the page that should be ranked and indexed.

This does not affect any individual events, which are all canonicalized individually.

That said, while I think this is an ok solution for Yoast SEO / Modern Tribe combination, I think ideally there would be rel="prev" and rel="next" links on the date-based event views so that search bots understand your calendar is part of a series.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by nocabt.

Great hint, nocabt,
do you know what Google does with the past events? I dont want them to be noindex but the coming events to be indexed.

Thanks.