Small thing - No Index tag for Category pages? WordPress SEO Plugin « Support Forum | Kriesi.at

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Small thing - No Index tag for Category pages? WordPress SEO Plugin

11 posts from 4 voices

Started 2 months ago by loudcow
Latest reply from Devin
This topic is not a support question

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loudcow
Member

Hi there - I've discovered that for two sites I've built using your themes my category pages are automatically set to "no index" and hence are not being indexed by search engines. It seems to be hard coded in the head via the theme not to index categories or portfolio categories? I use WordPress SEO by Yoast but cannot seem to change the "no index" to "index" for categories or portfolio category pages - just checking if this is hard-coded into the theme files (never seen this with other themes) and if so how do I change it? On each of the category pages the following appears - <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Here is a sample page - http://hunterjacobs.com.au/category/testimonials/ - I've deleted WordPress SEO plugin thinking it was screwing with things but still to no avail. The 'no index' meta remains with or without the plugin installed.

Something of note that may be related: When I install WordPress SEO on any of your themes I get a warning that says "Cannot modify head" - nothing breaks but wondering if this is related to not being able to change the no index meta.

Thanks in advance:)

Posted 2 months ago #
Dude
Dude
Open up header.php and delete following line:
```
if (function_exists('avia_set_follow')) { echo avia_set_follow(); }
```
WordPress SEO will take care of the robots tag and you don't need the default "theme seo code".
Posted 2 months ago #
loudcow
Member

Awesome - Thanks for the quick response. I'll give it a try. Cheers:)

Posted 2 months ago #
Boris
Member

Hi,

I am having the same problem and will try the solution mentioned above, too.

But have a few things to add to this:

1) Those sitemaps are not beeing indexed by google:
post_tag-sitemap.xml
and
category-sitemap.xml

how do I solve this? (Both, with the solution, mentioned above?)

2) robots.txt is blocking this file (very odd..) http://www.hebammenblog.de/wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/wordpress/img/trans.gif

what is going on, and how do I solve it?

3) google want to crawl this file, but cant do it: wp-content/themes/sentence/framework/

what is going on, and how do I solve it?

My robots.txt says:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Hope you can help :-)

Best Boris

Posted 2 months ago #
Devin
Moderator

Hi Boris,

Google has no need to crawl any of the theme files or wordpress admin files so your robots.txt is fine.

You can manually submit sitemaps to google if they aren't getting index by help of the plugin properly http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34657

Regards,

Devin

Posted 2 months ago #
Boris
Member

Hi Devin,

so I made the change. The no-index, follow problem is solved.

The other errors still appear.
Even though you are saying, that it doesn't matter: Nobody likes errors in the webmastertools, I guess.
So can you say something to issue 2, and 3, maybe? That would be great for my learnings and I would love to just understand what's going on! ;-)

Best Boris

Posted 2 months ago #
Devin
Moderator

I'm not sure how best to explain it but the files that run the theme don't need to be read by google. They don't really have any front facing code or user interface so it doesn't make any sense for them to be read.

I don't know what error you are seeing so I'm not able to comment specifically on what the specific cause for it is.

You can also add:
Disallow: /wp-content/

To your robots file as again, there isn't any content in your theme files that needs to be searchable by google (or any other search engine).

Posted 2 months ago #
Boris
Member

Hi Devin,

thanks for explaining. I already understood that. ;-) The question is: Why is google trying to reach those files?
The errors are explained above. So if you would like to have a look..? See 2) and 3) I can try Disallow: /wp-content/ but this will not solve the problem I guess.

Someting must point to those two locartions, otherwise google would not try to look it up, i figure.

Best Boris

Posted 2 months ago #
Devin
Moderator

I honestly have no idea. If your sitemap xml pointed to those places then perhaps that is how and why.

There should be no reason for the spider to crawl them from the content it gets from the theme files. Eg, there is nothing in the generated content pointing to framework files or that individual gif.

Posted 2 months ago #
Boris
Member

Hi,

nope, none of the xml files are pointing to them.
The only ones that are a little bit untypical are those that point to pages like the contact form or the archives.

Dou you think it is a disadvantage at all, to have theses errors mit google?

Best Boris

Posted 2 months ago #
Devin
Moderator

Probably not. If they aren't able to read them then they just wont be indexed. Everything else on the site will and that is what is important.

Regards,

Devin

Posted 2 months ago #