404 Error page – Remove Noindex

@soupia18 You can remove the noindex tag from a specific page by using a developer filter. You can find examples of this here.

I tested adding the following code snippet to the functions.php file, and was able to confirm that it successfully removed the noindex tag from the 404 page of a test site:

add_filter( 'wpseo_robots', 'yoast_seo_robots_remove_404' );

function yoast_seo_robots_remove_404( $robots ) {
  if ( is_404() ) {
    return false;
  } else {
    return $robots;
  }
}

Regarding your question about the idea and benefits of adding a noindex tag to the 404 page, this is because having a 404 page be indexed in Google’s search results is not a useful result for users. You can read more on this topic in the following article: Which pages to noindex or nofollow.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by devnihil.

Hi there – thanks for the response and the info to remove the noindex.
Greatly appreciated.