‘noindex’ detected in the ‘robots’ meta tag”

update: I went into the Yoast SEO tools and found the robots.txt file, this is what it says in the file:

User-agent: DomainCrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: SemrushBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: AhrefsBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /.jpg Disallow: /.JPG
Disallow: /.png Disallow: /.PDF
Disallow: /.pdf Disallow: /.mp3
Disallow: /.MOV Disallow: /.mov
Disallow: /.avi Disallow: /.avi
Disallow: /.csv Disallow: /.data
Crawl-delay: 2

Can anyone tell me if there is any error to correct?
Because I’ve noticed that most of the pages on my site blocked by robots are links to pdf example https://val-tec.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/scheda-power-cool-180-evans.pdf

Hello @sibi84,

Thanks for using the Yoast SEO plugin. I’ve addressed your concerns below:

noindex detected in the ‘robots’ meta tag
Can you provide one of the URLs that were reported to have this issue? Or does it apply to all your content?

Robots.txt
Your robots.txt file does not meet our recommended guidelines. I suggest using the following:
# START YOAST BLOCK
# ---------------------------
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: https://val-tec.it/sitemap_index.xml
# ---------------------------
# END YOAST BLOCK

Hello @maybellyne, first of all: thanks so much for the reply.
The block for indexing concerns 88 pages, of which:

• 19 blocked by robots.txt
• 37 excluded by the ‘noindex’ tag
• 25 Page scanned but not currently indexed

Should I put the code block you sent me in the robots.txt file deleting everything else, or in a specific place? Sorry, but I really don’t know anything about code.

Here are some examples of links to pages I have blocked by robots (most are pdfs of data sheets of our products):

https://val-tec.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/scheda-power-cool-180-evans.pdf

https://val-tec.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Vestas-Wind-Turbine-Gearbox-Lube-Oil.pdf

Instead, here are some examples of links to pages that I have excluded based on the “noindex” tag:

https://val-tec.it/2023/10/12/

https://val-tec.it/2024/06/13/

The strange thing about these is that I do not have any articles on the site where I have left the date as the permalink, I have set it as a setting that there is always the title of the page as the permalink so in reality I do not know why these pages with the date as the permalink were created.

Thank you so much for the advice you are giving me, I really appreciate it

Should I put the code block you sent me in the robots.txt file deleting everything else, or in a specific place? Sorry, but I really don’t know anything about code.

Yes, I recommend removing everything else and using the directives I shared previously.

Here are some examples of links to pages I have blocked by robots (most are pdfs of data sheets of our products)

According to Google, the simplest way to prevent PDF documents from appearing in search results is to add an?X-Robots-Tag: noindex?in the HTTP header used to serve the file. We also have additional information on using the X-Robots-Tag here:?https://yoast.com/x-robots-tag-play/

here are some examples of links to pages that I have excluded based on the “noindex” tag

As we always recommend, these are date archives and redirect to your homepage. Date archives (e.g.?https://val-tec.it/2023/10/12/) are based on publication dates. From an SEO perspective, the posts in these archives have no real relation to the other posts except for their publication dates, which doesn’t say much about the content. They could also lead to duplicate content issues. This is why we recommend you to disable date archives.

I have set it as a setting that there is always the title of the page as the permalink so in reality I do not know why these pages with the date as the permalink were created.

These are created by WordPress so it’s good that they already redirect to the homepage.

Let me know if you have follow-up questions. I’ll be happy to answer them!

I added the lines in the code as per your advice, thank you.
I went searching on the web for how to disable archive dates as per your advice and found this article: https://vielhuber.de/it/blog/disattivare-le-pagine-archivio-wordpress/

so I added this code:

set_404();
status_header(404);
nocache_headers();
}
}
add_action(‘template_redirect’, ‘disable_uneeded_archives’);

but now everything has disappeared from the site on the products page and also news, I have tried re-inserting the menu (which was a link to the articles with the given category ‘products’ and ‘news’ but still nothing can be seen on the two pages of the site.

https://val-tec.it/category/prodotti/
https://val-tec.it/category/news/

I’ve tried going back into functions.php to remove the lines inserted above but it tells me this:

Your changes to the PHP code were cancelled due to an error on line 10 of the file wp-content/themes/oceanwp/header.php. Please correct and try saving again.

Error not detected: Call to undefined function oceanwp_html_classes() in wp-content/themes/oceanwp/header.php:10
Stack trace: 0 wp-includes/template.php(810): require_once() 1 wp-includes/template.php(745): load_template() 2 wp-includes/general-template.php(48): locate_template() 3 wp-content/themes/oceanwp/page.php(12): get_header() 4 wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include(‘…’) 5 wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once(‘…’) 6 index.php(17): require(‘…’) 7 {main}

launched

What have I done???? probably the code I found on that site caused me an error… but I don’t know how to fix it, I don’t know if perhaps it was better to keep the error of archives rather than having this problem.
Can you help me overcome it?
Thank you very much

ps: line 10 of the header.php file is this:

<html class=”<?php echo esc_attr( oceanwp_html_classes() ); ?>” <?php language_attributes(); ?>>

I went searching on the web for how to disable archive dates as per your advice

Date archives were already disabled by Yoast SEO; that’s why this date archive redirects to your homepage. The setting is found in WordPress > Yoast SEO > Settings > Advanced > Date archives. The code snippet you found is unnecessary

Your changes to the PHP code were cancelled due to an error on line 10 of the file wp-content/themes/oceanwp/header.php. Please correct and try saving again.

Since you have tampered with the theme’s functions.php file, I will download the theme afresh to get the original copy of that file and replace it. You could also speak to the theme developers.

thank you very much, I replaced the file and fixed the problem on the site.
As for the indexing problems I hope the modified robots file will help us, I already set to retry the indexing validation, we will see what happens

Thanks again for everything you have been very kind