/page/ Indexing After Removal From Yoast

  • Resolved bward

    (@bward)


    6 years, 11 months ago

    Yoast,

    Great job on the plugin first and foremost.

    In an effort to update your code in a recent update you removed /page/2 for example from no-indexing as a setting. The explanation in the code update was that search engines were better now at not indexing “rel=”next” ” and “rel=”prev” ” tags.

    Unfortunately, I am seeing a lot of our archives /page/2, /page/3, etc becoming indexed since this change. I have given it quite a bit of time actually and they are certainly incrementing. We just went https on Sunday and I now see an https /page/104 indexed as an example.

    Is this something you could consider bringing back?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Support Michael Ti?a

    (@mikes41720)

    For a while, SEOs thought it might be a good idea to add a noindex robots meta tag to page 2 and further of a paginated archive. This would prevent people from finding page 2 and further in the search results. The idea was that the search engine would still follow all these links, so all the linked pages would still be properly indexed.

    The problem is that at the end of last year, Google said something that caught our attention: long-term noindex on a page will lead to them not following links on that page. This makes adding noindex to page 2 and further of paginated archives a bad idea, as it might lead to your articles no longer getting the internal links they need.

    Because of what Google said about long-term noindex, in Yoast SEO v6.3 we removed the option to add noindex to subpages of archives. Should page 2 and further of an archive have a canonical link to page 1, or to itself? The idea was that you mostly want visitors to end up on page 1 of an archive. That page is usually the most relevant for the majority of users.

    Google is very clear now: each page within a paginated series should canonicalize to itself, so /page/2/ has a canonical pointing to /page/2/. This is why you see your paginated archives being indexed.

    To learn more about it, you can refer to this article — https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/

    Thread Starter bward

    (@bward)

    Alright, I appreciate you letting me know. I read that article over.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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