Setting cookies to unnecessary causing noindexing of pages

  • Resolved laraej

    (@laraej)


    6 years, 8 months ago

    Hi, I would like to report an incompatibility between GDPR Cookie Consent plugin (1.5.9) and Yoast SEO plugin (7.7.3).

    When both plugins are active, a robots noindex meta tag gets automatically added to <head> of all the pages, preventing our site from getting indexed:
    <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>

    More specifically, when both Yoast SEO and GDPR Cookie Consent are active and all the cookies in the “Cookie List” of GDPR Cookie Consent are marked as necessary the indexing works fine. The noindexing problem appears only when we have any of the cookies (such as Google analytics) marked as unnecessary in the “Cookie List” of GDPR Cookie Consent plugin.

    We confirmed this incompatibility with Health Check plugin, as well as manually deactivating different plugins and testing their combinations together. We know the problem is not from Yoast SEO since when we deactivate GDPR Cookie Consent plugin the indexing problem disappears. Also we didn’t see this issue before setting some of the cookies to unnecessary on GDPR Cookie Consent.

    Now as a temporary fix we have set all the cookies to necessary. Could you please look into this and let us know if you have any suggestions or solutions. Thank you in advance.

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

    (@cookiebot)

    Hi @laraej

    This sounds very odd. Cookiebot does not set <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>. The only thing it does, is to add uc.js to <head>.

    Can you confirm this happens on a clean installation of WP, where you only have Cookiebot and Yoast SEO installed?

    Thread Starter laraej

    (@laraej)

    Thanks for your reply. The problem occurs on a clean installation of WP with only Cookiebot and Yoast SEO installed. But as I mentioned it occurs only when one or more cookies are set as “unnecessary” in the “Cookie List” of GDPR Cookie Consent. The robots noindex meta tag disappears when I return all the cookies to “necessary”.

    I don’t think GDPR Cookie Consent directly sets the robots to noindex. It seems setting cookies to unnecessary somehow triggers it through javascript or in another way. And then Yoats SEO simply sees the page as having a noindex status and reports it in the meta.

    Have you been able to replicate this? Please let me know if you require more details.

    Plugin Contributor Johan Holst Nielsen

    (@phpgeekdk)

    Hi @laraej,

    I tried to replicate this behavior – however I were not able to reproduce the error.

    Can you provide us with a link to your website? Then I can investigate further.

    Plugin Author cookiebot

    (@cookiebot)

    @laraej

    Also, you’re mentioning the “GDPR Cookie Consent” plugin. This is a different plugin than Cookiebot. Have you written in the wrong support forum? I’ll go ahead and mark this as resolved for now.

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by cookiebot.
    Thread Starter laraej

    (@laraej)

    It seems I have reported this bug in the wrong support forum. Sorry about this and thanks for your help.

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