Yoast adding meta follow and index to expired events

Hi @fooey

Upon checking the event URL you’ve shared with us, we do see that there are two meta robots tags in the page source, one from the Yoast SEO plugin that has the ‘index’ tag and another one from another source that has a meta robots tag of ‘noindex’. We definitely would only recommend 1 set of meta tag robots values so as not to cause any contradictions and conflict when the crawlers and bots scan the page.

Would it be possible for you to edit the event itself and set it to not show in the search results (which would add the “noindex” tag) in the advanced section of the Yoast SEO meta box by following the steps here – https://yoast.com/help/how-do-i-noindex-urls/#single

Once you’ve saved the changes, does it then reflect accordingly in the page source?

Hello, thanks for your response. There is no Yoast meta section in the page/event editor to change any settings for Yoast even though it is set to display within Yoast settings. Also, that would be extraneous to go through each individual event and change the settings there. The snippet that was added to prevent indexing of past events was from Event Espresso but I cannot get the same from Yoast. What else can be done? I don’t think they are working well together.

Hello,

It seems Event Espresso is a premium plugin so we are unable to test it. However, we assume it will create its own custom post type which should appear under WordPress > SEO > Search Appearance > Content Types. That way, you control the settings. Can you share a full screenshot of what you have in WordPress > SEO > Search Appearance > Content Types?

Here is the screenshot of the two post types. https://imgur.com/a/Et8GNU9 I have already checked this and there is no way to turn off indexing from “past or expired events”. I can disable “archived events” in search results but that does not change the meta on the expired events. That is why Event Espresso gave me the snippet to add that adds a meta for no-index, no-follow on expired events. I just cannot turn off the Yoast meta for this, please advise.

Thanks for sharing. The feature Yoast SEO has is to noindex all events & vendors not archived events.

However, we have a noindex filter – wpseo_robots that you can use to apply a noindex tag to URLs on your site. This guide explains more: https://gist.github.com/amboutwe/0c71e42aa164238007d7ea88f174a93f#file-yoast_seo_robots_remove_single-php. You will likely need to create some kind of custom code solution that works for your needs.

Unfortunately, there’s a difference between the support we can offer and the level of programming needed to change (core) features of our plugin. Since we don’t want to take the risk that we break your website by suggesting incorrect or incomplete code, we cannot advise you on how to make such changes. And even though we cannot be of any assistance, you’re completely free to change anything in the plugin to better suit your needs.

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