Lastest Posts Homepage

  • Resolved heartwired

    (@heartwired)


    6 years, 9 months ago

    First off, I just wanted to say I really love every aspect of TSF. It looks excellent and is so much less bloated than Yoast. I really appreciate the work you’ve done.

    I am, however, running across an issue with the sitemap indexing my homepage. I launched the site a couple days ago, and turned off the “noindex” options, but the root / isn’t showing up in the TSF generated sitemap. Here are some of the settings:
    Home Page > Robots
    Everything is unchecked as suggested.

    Robots Meta Settings > Indexing
    Unchecked – Apply NoIndex to Category Archives
    Unchecked – Apply NoIndex to Tag Archives
    Checked – Apply NoIndex to Author Archives
    Checked – Apply NoIndex to Date Archives
    Checked – Apply NoIndex to Search Pages
    Checked – Apply NoIndex to Attachment Pages
    Unchecked – Apply NoIndex to entire site

    I also just noticed that my category pages aren’t included in the sitemap either. Any Idea why?

    It should be noted that I’m using the “Your latest posts” option for the homepage.
    I can’t tell if this issue will actually affect my SEO or SERPs because I’m also having issues with robots.

    I’ll include this extra info just in case it’s somehow related, but I’m not expecting you to figure out this issue.

    When I search Mid Mod Mango in Google, it comes back as being blocked by robots.txt. I checked my Search Console, and this is what Google saw on the 17th of this month:

    User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Sitemap: https://midmodmango.com/sitemap.xml

    I’ve run the homepage through Google’s robot tested and it came back “allowed”.

    I’m hoping this is just a time thing.

    Thanks for any help you’re able to provide.
    I appreciate it!

    Jacob

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Hi @heartwired,

    I’m glad you like the plugin ?? Thanks for the feedback!

    Homepage not included in the sitemap:
    The homepage isn’t included because it’s a blog while there are no posts on your website. Now, because many users make use of this inconsistency in WordPress via themes, the robots tag won’t automatically add “noindex” on the homepage.
    But, the sitemap doesn’t comply with this reasoning — compared to the rest of the plugin, it’s a relatively dumb tool.

    The fix: Either add a single public post or change the homepage to a static page.
    But, you can ignore this issue: the sitemap doesn’t affect SEO.

    Archive pages aren’t in the sitemap:
    This is intentional.

    Google shows it’s blocked by robots.txt…
    Looking at your sitemap, I think you’ve recently overhauled your website.
    I suggest giving Google a little more time to crawl through and reindex your website.

    In fact, I already see that your discovery no longer holds true for any found page.

    To see what Google found in real time, use this search query:

    site:example.com

    I hope this explains the lot ?? Cheers!

    Thread Starter heartwired

    (@heartwired)

    Thanks for responding so quickly!
    I don’t understand what you mean by “there are no posts on your website”. We have 7 published posts that are all listed out on the homepage.
    I’m not following the rest of that paragraph either. You’re saying that the sitemap tool is listing the homepage as “noindex” because there are apparently no posts?

    In terms of the robots.txt stuff, when I used the “site:” query, I did see two of my posts show up. So that’s good! I assume that’s what you were suggesting?

    Thanks for the other info as well!

    Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Hi @heartwired,

    Oh… I guess the sitemap is dumber than I ought it to be.

    I thought those posts were from custom post types, I was wrong. I’m also able to replicate the issue you’re facing, and I’m going to dive into it to see what causes it. I’ll report back once I find out more. Thanks!
    Keep in mind that Google only uses the sitemap brought with TSF for update checking, which leads to faster indexing. It doesn’t improve ranking; so, this bug won’t harm your site.

    Yes, the site:example.com query in Google Search will show all currently indexed pages of your site as-is. That’s what I’m suggesting to use for investigating how Google picks up your meta ??

    Plugin Author Sybre Waaijer

    (@cybr)

    Quick update: I found the culprit, brought by yours truly in 3.0.4.

    The aptly named method is_post_included_in_sitemap() tests whether a post or page should be excluded.
    When the homepage is a blog it has the ID 0, this won’t be checked. Instead, it will return an undefined variable (resulting in a warning and the exclusion).

    As this isn’t a pressing issue, this will be fixed in the major release dubbed TSF v3.1.
    I can’t spare too many resources releasing fixes for “minor” issues because WordPress 5.0 (with Gutenberg) is around the corner.

    I hope you understand my decision. Have a wonderful day ??

    Thread Starter heartwired

    (@heartwired)

    Awesome. Glad you found it!
    I can understand that! I’m just happy you responded so quickly. That’s most important in my opinion.

    Thanks again!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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