Can't reset meta robots or meta robots back to original setting

@davidtleblanc

First type your site URI in browser’s address bar. After your site being loaded, test the source with ctrl+U command. If you really noticed that it is not followed in meta tags, then in your wordpress settings, goto settings>>reading then uncheck search engine visibility option.

If your issue not resolved even after the above settings made, then goto WordPress SEO dashboard>>security and dashboard>>Titles & Metas. You have to change the values.

Note: If your site having Cache plugins installed, the very first step that you have to do is delete cached data and disable cache plugin while testing or changing the settings in WordPress SEO plugin.

I hope this works for you.

B.V.Ramanarao,

Thank you for the reply. I will try your suggestions and report back.

B. V. Ramanarao

Sorry for not reporting back sooner and thanks for your help. Unfortunately, none of the suggestions worked or were applicable.

1. In the WordPress settings, settings>>reading, the search engine visibility option was unchecked.
2. In WordPress SEO, dashboard>>security and dashboard>>titles & metas, the values were/are set correctly.
3. I don’t have a cache plugin installed.

It seems that once something is checked no follow, no archive, it stays that way, no going back.

The only way to fix it back is to recreate the page.

@davidtleblanc
I’m having a similar problem.I switched my homepage for one I’d been working on with noindex, nofollow etc in place. I switched pages about 2 days ago and just noticed the nofollow while checking a different problem.

Have Cloudflare in developement mode and still stays @ nofollow?? All other setting changed – noindex to index etc…

This must be a bug somewhere, either in WordPress SEO or the current version of WordPress (3.8)
It just seems insane that if you toggle any setting on/off you can’t reverse your decision..
Maybe somewhere in the database it can be deleted.

Well after hours of googling I’ve resolved this issue to my satisfaction..
I’ve changed the NOFOLLOW to FOLLOW on my page the hard way.
I went into phpMyAdmin found the table wp_postmeta found my post by searching with post ID = and changed the _yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow from 1 to 0…
Figuring our where the _yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow resided was what took so long.
Anyway problem solved – double checked in page source code and no sign of index,nofollow on my home page!
Happy New Year..

We were having the same problem with a client’s site just yesterday. The problem, as I understand it, is that the default values in that Advanced tab are values like ‘0’, ‘none’, and ‘-‘. The plugin has a very specific check for those values in it’s post_save hook that prevent such values from being saved or changed in the database.

Lines 775-778 in admin/class-metabox.php (v. 1.4.22)

// Prevent saving "empty" values.
if ( ! in_array( $data, array( '', '0', 'none', '-', 'index,follow' ) ) ) {
  wpseo_set_value( $meta_box['name'], sanitize_text_field( $data ), $post_id );
}

So once you’ve set it, you’re managing it from there on out. No giving it back to Yoast to let the defaults take back over. There’s probably a good reason to do that, but I can’t figure out what it is. Not saving so many default values to the database, most likely. It’d be nice to have sort of a “back to default” option for each one that just erases the value from the DB.

Only way I was able to fix it (and FlatCurve’s idea was 100x better and I’m facepalming right now because I didn’t think of it yesterday) was to create a new page, change slugs, move children, and update the menu.

(I hope that code isn’t against the rules somehow and that this helped understand that it’s definitely an issue in the plugin – nothing we did wrong as users.)

Looks like they already knew and partially fixed it. We’re all just waiting on a plugin update. ??

https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/commit/af26999e07d7635422545aaaf224be4a5b9b8d1e

What it doesn’t do yet though is save the “empty” or default values (and by save, I mean delete the chosen values) for the fields in the advanced tab. Already let them know. Hopefully a fix will come through soon.

FlatCurve and rlamb2,

Thanks for the replies and thanks for the solution Flatcurve. Now I just have to set aside some time to get it fixed.

rlamb2, I hope you are right about plugin update. You were doing what I was starting to plan to do. I hope I can save myself some work you had to go through.

DTL

I downloaded the new version 1.5 beta version and it fixed the issue. I found the link on Yoast twitter page… also found this article that explains what they are doing new.. https://tinyurl.com/nks23wx

I just wanted to add to the discussion for those of you who might need some additional help. I had set some pages to noindex, nofollow, never include in sitemap, never include in html sitemap and none of those setting would revert back to the default.

These are the 4 entries you need to query in the database:

_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex
_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow
_yoast_wpseo_sitemap-include
_yoast_wpseo_sitemap-html-include

The default value for noindex and nofollow should be 0.
The default value for the sitemaps is –

Hope this helps.

Does anyone have a link to beta 1.5 because I get a certificate violation and it’s a dead page on the Yoast site here: https://yoast.com/downloads/wordpress-seo-beta-1.5.zip