How to prevent posts of a specific category being indexed?

Hello @chcw

Thanks for reaching out about your post categories. To noindex specific categories, edit such from WordPress > Posts > Categories, then scroll down to the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO meta box. For the option, Allow search engines to show this Category in search results?, choose NO.

Hi, @maybellyne

Sorry but what I mean is NOT a specific category page, but the posts of a specific category.

For example, we have posts of “news” and “faqs” categories.

I want all posts of “news” categories NOT be indexed. But want all posts of “faqs” categogies be indexed.

Thanks for the clarification. To noindex specific posts in a category, you can use a filter to exclude based on the post ID. Please refer to our developer docs for the implementation.

Hi, @maybellyne

That is a bit inconvienent, since I need to find out all the Post IDs first, and then add the filter.

Where is the noindex flag stored? I want to update the MySQL table to perform the batch change of all this flag for the specific category.

You can check the is_robots_noindex column in the yoast_indexable table.

Hi, @maybellyne

Thank you very much.

Hi, @maybellyne

I find ‘_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex’ field in ‘wp_postmeta’ table. What’s the relationship between this field and ‘is_robots_noindex’ in yoast_indexable?table

Hello @chcw

The wp_postmeta stores additional information connected to a post that’s user-defined, so the _yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex field stores the meta robots you set for a post.

However, since v14.0 of Yoast SEO, we introduced the Indexables with tables such as yoast_indexable. The Indexables store the metadata for all your pages in a separate database table. By doing that, they fetch all of a page’s metadata in one simple database request instead of many individual requests.

When you run the SEO data optimization analysis in WordPress > Yoast SEO > Tools, the data in the _yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex field is transferred/synced with the contents of the is_robots_noindex?column

You can read more here.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Maybellyne.