Noindex on Tags Not Working

To help you further, here I’m sharing the screenshot of the Yoast setting I disabled. It has been disabled for months.

But after Sep 11, I started to see tags being indexed by Google. This setting is still disabled and GSC URL Inspection tool is showing that tag pages are allowed for indexing.

I cleared cache (WordPress + CDN + Hosting), tried disabling plugins one by one, but no luck.

• This reply was modified 5 months, 3 weeks ago by InsideTechno.

Hello @insidetechno

Thanks for using the Yoast SEO plugin. I understand you have excluded tags from search results; that works well, as the tag sitemap at /tag-sitemap.xml/ returns a 404 error. You mentioned that tags like /tag/android/ are still indexed. I can also confirm the index, follow?in the meta robots tag. This is the expected behaviour.

The setting is only for the tag archive. You still need to set each tag to noindex individually. You could use the filter found?here?to?noindex?each taxonomy. Typically, code snippets are added to your theme’s functions.php file. If you’re not familiar with using code snippets, we’d like to refer you to the WordPress documentation on?how to use a filter.

I just tested the same mechanism on another website. I’ve disabled ‘show tags in search results’ (without making any changes to individual tags).

Now, all the tags are showing noindex in GSC and other tools for that website. But the same thing is not working on this website (InsideTechno.com).

This setting was disabled on this website for months and no tags were indexed until Sep 11.

As mentioned previously, the setting is for the tag archive. Indivudal tags need to be set to noindex for them not to show in search results. Also, the data you see in the Google Search Console are not in real time; that means setting a tag archive/tag to noindex won’t immediately impact what you see in Google Search Console.