Silly yoast simply remove the noindex for subpages of category

Hi @jamiesc,

Thanks for your comment.

We are sorry to hear you are not happy with our plugin.

In version 6.3 of the plugin, we removed the ability to noindex archive subpages. As you can read on this post, the reason for this decision is two-fold:

• Google has gotten much better at working with paginated series. The rel="next" and rel="prev" tags (outputted by Yoast SEO) make sure Google sends people to the first page in a paginated series. There may be cases though where Google will send people to a specific page in the series, but that’s when that page is the best match for their query.
• Noindexing all subpages leads to a lower amount of crawls for them, which subsequently leads to lower amounts of crawls for older articles, which is not a good idea on most sites.

On the other hand, if you’re getting duplicate title or meta description warnings for paginated archives only, you can safely ignore them. It won’t hurt your SEO. Please, refer to this post for more information: https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/ In the last part of the post, John Mueller from Google confirms that it’s normal and expected that paginated archives have the same title and meta description.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by monbauza.

Im aware of all these but Google still index the pages and the only reason the sites were punished is due to these pages. Even Google system itself cant confirm whether to index/punish or not with these pages as I can see from the ranking effects. You cant just implement or remove drastic feature like this without informing and thorough research. Google is not perfect and they always trial and error and flip flop but Yoast to just change or remove feature is so irresponsible.

Hi @jamiesc,

Thanks for following up.

Indexing your archive subpages shouldn’t cause your website to be punished. In fact, indexing them may be beneficial as more links to your posts and pages will be crawled by Google. That’s why we removed the feature to noindex subpages. It is not necessary for most users. That being said, if you still want to noindex archive subpages, you can do so by implementing the wpseo_robots filter. You’ll find some examples of use on this link.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by monbauza.

Really I don′t understand WHY Yoast keep messing up the no-index tag and the xml sitemap. Google search console is showing me an error in mobile, I check it out, and guess what? It′s the wp-content-uploads page. YEAH, IT ISN′T OPTIMIZED FOR MOBILE BECAUSE IT SHOULD NOT BE SHOWING UP AT ALL!!!
This plugin has become too risky to update since the media attachement bug. Now i think it′s too risky even to keep it installed ??

Hi @estehelecho,

We are not sure if the error you’re getting in Google Search Console is related to or caused by Yoast SEO. Can you please create a new topic in the plugin forum with as much information about the error as possible? Our support team will review it and assist you further.

Thanks!

And now wordpress 9.3 add in example.com/page/2 and also example.com/page.html/page/2 in all canonical and google got so confused. Ive uninstalled Yoast and then all these pages are gone. Yoast is seriously dumb now.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by Jess.

Hi @jamiesc,

Thanks for following up.

As you can read on this post, Google is very clear: subpages in a paginated series should include a canonical URL pointing to itself, so /page/2/ should have a canonical pointing to /page/2/. Yoast SEO has always followed this approach regarding canonical URLs, it’s not something new in version v9.3.

If you encounter any difficulties using our plugin, please create a new topic in the plugin forum so that our support team can better assist you.

Thanks!