too slow blocking google index

I completely understand your frustration because I had a very similar experience with Yoast SEO. The plugin caused all the pages on my website to be deindexed from Google due to a problem with the X-Robots-Tag: noindex header being applied to the sitemap. This issue completely wiped out my traffic and impressions on Google, leaving my website invisible to search engines.

What made it worse was that I had to manually request indexing for each URL in Google Search Console, which only allows 8 URLs per day, making it an incredibly slow and painful process to recover my site’s visibility.

Here’s everything I tried:

1. Checked my robots.txt file to ensure it wasn’t blocking anything.
2. Disabled SG Optimizer and cleared all server-side cache.
3. Modified the .htaccess file to force X-Robots-Tag: index, follow on the sitemap.
4. Verified the sitemap headers using cURL, which confirmed that the problem originated from Yoast SEO’s own code in the class-sitemaps.php file.

In the end, the only solution was to edit Yoast SEO’s core plugin file to fix the issue temporarily. However, I decided to migrate to Rank Math SEO, which has been much more reliable for sitemap generation and indexing.

If you’re still using Yoast SEO, I highly recommend switching to Rank Math SEO and clearing your entire cache after uninstalling Yoast to avoid lingering issues. Since switching, my sitemap headers are correct, and I haven’t had any further indexing problems.

Yoast SEO might be popular, but this kind of issue is unacceptable, especially for websites that rely on Google traffic. Save yourself the frustration and move to a better solution like Rank Math.

Hi @soyreinaldo

The ‘noindex’ directive that is found on the X-Robots-Tag of the sitemap URL (by default /sitemap_index.xml) shouldn’t affect the indexability of the actual URLs that are listed on the sitemap. It’s by design that there is a ‘noindex’ directive on the X-Robots-Tag of the sitemap because you don’t want your actual sitemap URL to show up in the search results for users to find, as it should be for the search engines. So that shouldn’t serve as any basis as to whether your actual posts or pages would show up on the search results or not.

Hi @cdlstudy

We understand that you tried out the Yoast SEO plugin for a month and it resulted in a block from appearing in Google’s search results. This would really depend on the content of your website, along with the settings that you’ve set within the plugin, depending if some pages or posts or categories were set to ‘noindex’ to not appear in the search results. However, without knowing more about your website or the settings, this would be difficult to determine if it was affected by the plugin directly. But by default, the Yoast SEO plugin would promote that your site would be visible and should show up in the search results.

If you ever wanted to give a try in using the plugin again, feel free to reach out to us at support and we could take a quick look if everything is set for your site to be indexed and to appear in the search results. We hope you consider it again sometime. Thanks for sharing your experience.

• This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by Michael Ti?a.