[NSFW] Site randomly got de -indexed, found this… help please.

@tvernon9999 We’re sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue on your site.

There are a number of ways you can set pages to noindex, so we would recommend checking all of them.

We would first recommend checking to make sure the robots meta tag is NOT set to noindex for the content type or taxonomy as a default setting, and you can check this setting by performing the following actions:

? In WordPress go to SEO>Search Appearance>Content Types
? For Pages set ‘Show Pages in search results’ to ‘Yes’
? Click ‘Save Changes’

In addition, you can set pages/posts setting of whether to be indexed individually on the page’s edit screen. You can check this by performing the following actions:

? Go to the Edit screen for a page/post
? Scroll down to the Yoast metabox
? Click on the ‘Advanced’ area
? For ‘Allow search engines to show this Page in search results?’ make sure this is set to ‘Yes’
* Note (setting this value to Yes will set meta robots to index and setting No would set meta robots to noindex)

Also, you are able to control the global indexing of the site in WordPress. You can check this in the following way:

? In WordPress go to Settings>Reading
? Make sure for ‘Search Engine Visibility’ that ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is NOT checked
? Click ‘Save Changes’

We also have a guide on how to set a page/post’s meta robots tag to noindex here: https://yoast.com/help/how-do-i-noindex-urls/

All settings are set to show in the search, have been for 7 years. This is why I am lost. Not to sound harsh but this answer you gave is a cut and paste answer for beginners. I need real help.

The meta tag shows <meta name=”robots” content=”index, noindex, follow”> It shouldn’t show both index and noindex, I didn’t change it. Tuning off plug ins doesn’t change it.

I went into the theme editor and checked the header php file and it doesn’t show there, checked other files and came up empty. How to fix this would be so welcomed. Where would the html be to fix this as I can’t find it anywhere.

Please help….

Dont worry, we fixed it by using a back up from a month ago. Still not sure how it happened. Close thread.

Hi,

Upon checking a few pages of your website, we are now seeing a meta robots output of:

<meta name='robots' content='index, follow, max-image-preview:large, max-snippet:-1, max-video-preview:-1' />

Were you able to resolve the issue? It definitely is not expected to have both the ‘index’ and ‘noindex’ tag appearing in the meta robots tag. Aside from the Yoast SEO plugin, it’s likely that another plugin or source such as custom code may have affected the meta robots tag. If the issue is still occurring, we would advise for you to perform a conflict check to rule out any chance of any plugin or theme conflicts — https://yoast.com/help/how-to-check-for-plugin-conflicts/

Otherwise, we would refer you to our developer documentation on the meta robots output and how you can modify it — https://developer.yoast.com/features/seo-tags/meta-robots/functional-specification & https://developer.yoast.com/customization/apis/overview

We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved due to inactivity. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.