Errors in GSC and G.News

Hi Marco, do you wish to prevent spiders from indexing certain URLs like category pages? This should be done with a “x-robots-tag” response header or “robots” meta tag, set to “noindex, follow”.

This is outside the scope of the sitemap plugin but can be done directly in the theme template files like archive.php or through another plugin.

hi Ravan,

thank you very much for the quick reply.

I’m confused: is it normal that Google News is trying to index content that are not posts? Couldn’t be a problem in your plugin / settings?

Yeah I’m surprised too that GN would try to index content that can be clearly identified (your html5 source seems correct) as an archive of multiple articles… But it cannot be prevented with the sitemap plugin or it’s settings.

These category pages do not feature in the GN Sitemap so the spider can only find them by following links on the articles themselves.

However, they do appear in the Yoast XML sitemap. I’d advise to disable category and tag sitemaps in the Yoast settings. Then also set category and tag pages to “noindex”…

Yeah I’m surprised too that GN would try to index content that can be clearly identified (your html5 source seems correct) as an archive of multiple articles… But it cannot be prevented with the sitemap plugin or it’s settings.
These category pages do not feature in the GN Sitemap so the spider can only find them by following links on the articles themselves.

Yes it seems very strange, I’ve not much experience in G.News but I can’t understand the logic behind this behaviour.

However, they do appear in the Yoast XML sitemap. I’d advise to disable category and tag sitemaps in the Yoast settings. Then also set category and tag pages to “noindex”…

I can’t do that because categories and even tags are very important for our seo strategy.

Thank you again,

Marco

OK I see. I can only refer you to the GN help forum on https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/news for clarification about these errors. Hope they can tell you more there…

If you ever get a good explanation, I’d be happy to know too ??