No Index Meta Setting on Plugin Tags Not Registering

Hi @virtualwayva,

There are many reasons for why you’re experiencing this behavior.

The “noindex” settings play no role in your website’s structure and layout. So, I’m assuming that with “site index”, you mean “Google’s index”.

First and foremost, I’d like to highlight that search engines use caches. Within those caches, they maintain a copy of every page they crawled. This cache is constantly updated with the help from crawlers; but, with over a hundred trillion pages to crawl, changes you make to your site won’t be effective immediately.

See: https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/

To review if your website’s well prepared for the next crawl, you should inspect the source (or trust the blue SEO Bar from TSF).
There, in your case, you should look for a piece of code at the top that looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noydir" />

When that “robots” meta tag has noindex in its content, Google (and other good bots) will tag the page for removal from their indexes. And it’ll be removed from search ASAP.

Please let me know if this helped out ?? If not, I’ll test out the plugin in question; but, I expect no avail from this. Cheers!

Sybre, thanks for the reply. I’m now realizing I mistyped / incorrectly referenced the issue. The pages are showing up in the site map. And of course, when I view the page source, it is only showing “<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir” />”.

Additionally, even though I have selected the “Apply noindex to this term?” in the gallery tags’ Robots Meta Settings, they are still showing as green / “Gallery tags is being indexed” in the gallery tag’s summary of SEO settings.

Hi @virtualwayva,

My apologies for the late reply.

I just tested out the plugin, and they’ve written their own “tag query”.
In fact, the tag is redirected to a non-editable “duplicated” page; this is by far the most ambitious and perplexing implementation I’ve seen.

This is outside of the WP Rewrite API. So, TSF can’t recognize it.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do substantially to resolve this.

You should highlight this at the “Photo Gallery by WD” plugin forums. Feel free to tag me and include a link to this reply.

Their implementation is so deeply embedded that it likely won’t change anytime soon, if at all ever. So, I’m afraid there’s nothing they can do, either.

With that, I recommend leaving the “fake tags as pages” as-is. They should not contain any substantial content at all, so search engines should regard them as “low quality”; barely ranking them. This shouldn’t affect the overall SERP performance of your site.

Background info:
What I got from browsing their code is that they save a copy of the tags as a WordPress Post via WDWLibrary::bwg_create_custom_post(), which is then called as a WordPress Widget. With that, they can control the full output on the front-end, so it should “seamlessly” integrate with themes without having to alter their layout.

WordPress, since version 1.5 and onwards, have given a lot of template control to themes and plugins. They never integrated this. Yet, this is why WooCommerce works so great with their tags and categories.