Pagination problem

Hello RezaY,

Thanks for reaching out regarding your paginated archives.

Unfortunately, there is no option in the plugin to add noindex to paginated archives. According to Google, adding noindex on a page long-term will lead to them not following links on that page. More recent statements imply that if a page isn’t in their index, the links on it and from it can’t be evaluated at all. So with that, we do not recommend adding noindex to page 2 and further on paginated archives.

However, if you still want to noindex paginated archive pages, you can use the filter located here. You or your developer can customize it depending on your needs.

thanks for your replay
I don’t want to add a no-index. I want to add a canonical reel to all paginated archives to the first cat or tag page.

Hello RezaY,

Thanks for following up.

The Yoast SEO plugin adds the rel="prev" & rel="next" tags to help deal with paginated content, as well as the canonical URL. Google is very clear; each page within a paginated series should canonicalize to itself, so /page/2/ has a canonical pointing to /page/2/ and so on. You can read more about that here: https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/.

So if this is not the case with your website, you may want to share the affected URLs so we can investigate further.

We look forward to hearing from you.

my problem is instead of the category page, google index category, or tag is paginated.
for example
site.com/cat/page3 indexed instead of site.com/cat
and I have this problem on a website that uses Yoast. and on the others that I used rank math just main cat pages indexed.

so I have to canonicalize cats to themselves. one by one on the cat edit page in the Yoast setting

Hi @mohammad983

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 in late 2017, Google said something that caught our attention: long-term noindex on a page will lead to them not following links on that page. More recent statements imply that if a page isn’t in their index, the links on/from it can’t be evaluated at all – their indexing of pages is tied to their processing of pages.

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 6.3 we removed the option to add noindex to subpages of archives.

This is why we recommend that each category subpage (/page/2/ and onwards) canonicalizes to itself instead of referring to the main category page without the subpage.

You can learn more about it here – https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/

We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.