Noindex Tag Showing Up on Google

@advicewithmy We checked on several of your tag pages and confirmed that Yoast SEO is outputting the ‘noindex’ tag as expected (see image here and here).

Regarding this and the title changes, how long ago were the changes to them made?

Also, whereas Google typically uses the title from the metadata for indexing, this is not always the case. Google will sometimes modify the title of the URL as it sees fit, as well as sometimes adding the brand or sitename to the end of your title. This is not due to the plugin not functioning as expected, but rather is due to Google modifying the Title it indexes as it’s algorithm has concluded that there is a better version to index.

We also have additional information on this topic available at the following links: https://yoast.com/google-page-title/ and https://kb.yoast.com/kb/google-shows-different-titles-for-my-site/. Please refer to these articles as the include recommendations for crafting a page title which will help increase the likelihood that Google will use the title you specified instead of modifying your page’s title as it sees fit.

Hi Carl,

Thank you so much for your assistance!

It has been over a month since I selected noindex for my tags.
However, when you do search up on site:advicewithmy.com, my tags are still showing and sometimes there are double separators. Could it be related to my theme?

Thanks for the article suggestions, they are super helpful.

@advicewithmy That’s very strange if you made those changes over a month ago. I rechecked the cached version of the tags/categories page in question and what is occurring is that Google’s cached version of the pages (example here, see image here) does still have the <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> robots meta tag. This means that Google hasn’t re-crawled the pages in question since they were set to be disallowed in the index, which is why they are still appearing in the results. It’s even more strange as the cache showed me Google hasn’t crawled (at least the page I checked) since May 18, so it’s been significantly longer than a month.

To resolve this, there are two things we’d recommend. The first is deleting and resubmitting your sitemap in Google Search Console. Hopefully that is enough to facilitate Google re-crawling the site. We’d recommend this first, and then giving Google a few days to re-crawl the site and update it’s index. On average that can take around 48-72 hours, but can depend on numerous other factors.

To resubmit the sitemap, we recommend the following steps:

1. Clear all your caching from your theme, plugin, server, CDN like CloudFlare or browser. If you are not sure how to clear caching from theme/plugin please speak to those authors. If you want to clear cache from the server, please speak to your host provider. To clear the cache from a browser use this guide: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/how-to-clear-my-browsers-cache/
2. Delete your sitemap in Google. Doing so will not hurt the SEO of the site. This guide explains more (scroll to the bottom): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/183669?hl=en.
3. Submit the sitemap again. Be sure to submit only sitemap_index.xml and nothing else. This guide explains more: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/submit-sitemap-search-engines/.
4. Monitor the results to see if the tag/catgory pages are removed from the search results.

After performing these steps, giving Google adequate time to re-crawl the site, and then checking whether the tag/category pages have been removed, you are still seeing the issue present, we’d next recommend to try forcing a reindex of the tag/category pages individually by using the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.

If you have your site setup in Google Search Console you can force Google to re-crawl a page by using the URL Inspection Tool feature. You can use this tool to request indexing of the page to try to force Google’s index to update by doing the following:

1. Login to Google Search Console at https://search.google.com/search-console and choose your website from the ‘Site Property’ menu.
2. Type or paste the complete URL of the article in the top entry bar.
3. Expand the ‘Coverage’ section to view the ‘Last crawl’ date.
4. If the page has changed since the ‘Last crawl’ date, click ‘Test Live URL’.
5. If the test returns any errors, please make any necessary changes so the URL is available to Google before proceeding.
6. Click ‘Request Indexing’.

We also we have a guide on using the URL Inspection Tool feature here: https://kb.yoast.com/kb/fetch-as-googlebot/ and you can also read more about it in Google’s documentation here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by devnihil.

Hi @advicewithmy ,

We’re closing this thread as there seem no further questions from you. Please feel free to open a new thread should you have further concerns.