‘noindex’ search console issue

Incidentally, I just checked my robots.txt.

All that’s in it is this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

(sorry, not trying to ‘bump’ this up or anything)

Here’s one of the pages which is now supposedly blocked by robots.txt.

The page I linked to in my original post (above) appears no longer to be listed as blocked.

https://johnwhiteillustrator.com/portfolio/newspaper-illustration-book-village/

The odd things is, in one ‘Search Console’ screen it lists 10 as affected.

On another graph it lists over 150!

Very confusing.

We looked at your provided page and we can confirm that Yoast SEO isn’t setting it as noindex. So, if you are seeing that Google is finding it as noindex, please clear all of your site caches and resubmit your site and sitemap to Google search console property to check whether this resolves the issue.

On the other hand, you can set index or noindex directly from the Yoast SEO -> Search Appearance -> Content Types (tab) or from the page level Yoast SEO meta box advanced options.

In addition, we can also confirm that your robots.txt crawl rules are fine.

Hi Md,
Thanks for the help.

Actually, I posted a second page above, which is affected, the original one I posted no longer is affected for some reason.

I’ll try those tips you gave me now–if I can find the means to do them.

Thanks ??
John

Back again…

I can confirm that all of the Yoast > Search Appearance > Content Types: have been set to ‘show’.
—————
Within this page:
https://johnwhiteillustrator.com/portfolio/newspaper-illustration-book-village/
I checked a project post and clicked the Yoast gear/settings icon:

‘Allow search engines to show this Project in search results?’ is set to:
‘Default for Projects Currently, yes’

Should search engines follow links on this Project?
Yes

‘Meta Robots Advanced’:
‘Sitewide Default, none.

John

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by johnnyivan.

We notice that https://johnwhiteillustrator.com/portfolio/newspaper-illustration-book-village/ has a 301 redirect to https://johnwhiteillustrator.com/portfolio/newspaper-illustration-book-lost-village-john-mckenna/

We would suggest that you submit such URLs for re-crawling so that Google can update them. Could you please try the following:

1) Submit each URL you want re-crawled using the Fetch as Googlebot tool.
2) Delete your sitemap from Google Search Console and resubmit it for indexing.

Hi Michael and Md,
Thanks for your attention on this.

Yesterday, I discovered edit snippet Yoast facility and changed the ‘SLUG’ (?) to:
/newspaper-illustration-book-lost-village-john-mckenna/
which also changed the SEO friendly URL.

Q: Perhaps that accounts for the re-direct?

Also, regarding what I posted earleir:
‘Allow search engines to show this Project in search results?’ is set to:
‘Default for Projects Currently, yes’

Should search engines follow links on this Project?
Yes

‘Meta Robots Advanced’:
‘Sitewide Default, none.

Q: Is the latter setting causing problems?

Re: Cacheing, I don’t have any at present. Which might account for my site’s sluggishness.

Re: Michael’s 1.) Submit each URL you want re-crawled using the Fetch as Googlebot tool.

I’m not sure which ones to submit. Q. Is it the 10 or so that search console lists in one place, or the 150 (unknown ones) in the search console graph?

Sorry for the barrage of info and questions!
John

I should add that any re-direct that might have been created by Yoast’s ‘slug editor’ (above) hasn’t appeared in the .htaccess file where I created my other 301 redirects.

I made those to deal with any broken links/search results to/for my old site.

Sorry, back again.
I just looked in ‘YOAST > SEO > Search Appearance’ again. I saw this.

Show Format in search results?
No

This is weird because I’m convinced that every time I’ve checked those settings, all of them were set to enabled, show, or yes.

Is this the problem? along with the aforementioned:
‘Meta Robots Advanced’:
‘Sitewide Default, none.

You identified multiple queries that you want us to address and we’ll address them in order:

• Yoast SEO Free doesn’t create any automatic redirects from the old URL to the new one, Yoast SEO Premium does. So, if you have changed the slug of your page and it is redirecting now to the new URL, we are not sure what else is creating the redirect for you.
• If you want to see any content types or taxonomies in the search results, you’ll select them to Yes. It is that simple!
• You’ll submit all the URLs to run fetch as Google from your Google search console property that you’re having the issue with.
• You can run fetch as Google to as many URLs as you’d like to.
• Would you mind open a new thread regarding the Show Format in search results? issue so that we can investigate that further?

Hi Md,
– Re: Re-direct: The funny thing is, when I changed the ‘stub’ via YOAST, the SEO title also automatically changed. So I imagine the only way that WordPress can allow everything to keep linking up (in-bouns, and external) is for it (not necessarily Yoast) to create a re-direct.
– I need to find out what ‘taxonomies’ and ‘content types’ actually are. I’ll research further.
– Yes, I followed your advice and Fetched as Google yesterday, thanks. All now marked as ‘pending.’
– I’ll start a new thread as requested.

I donm’t know what I can do about the 150+ pages that are supposedly a problem in search console, as I have no way of finding out what they are.

Thanks for the continued assistance, gents ??
John