How to noindex blog categories and tags in WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace

? noindex your tags and categories ?

If you already know what that means and why, scroll down to find out how to do it for:

• WordPress
• Wix
• Squarespace

For the rest of you:

Why should I noindex tags and categories?

When you write & publish a blog post it has a URL (web page address) – let’s say it’s my-website/my-awesome-blog-post.

But you’ve read somewhere that it’s good to split your blog into categories such as Service 1, Service 2, Thoughts, Press Mentions, News, etc. (It is.)

And you’ve read somewhere else that it’s good to add tags to your posts, which might be words associated with the blog post – in my case these might be things such as Google, Updates, EEAT, July, etc.

But here’s what happens when you do that.

1. Your blog post has its original address of my-website/my-awesome-blog-post.
2. It also appears, in part at least, on my-website/blog/category/service-1.
3. And on my-website/my-awesome-blog-post/blog/tag/updates, etc.
4. If you’re a little overzealous in your tagging and category allocation, it could appear in multiple places that have /category and /tag in them.

What that means is that, unless you seriously know what you’re doing with your SEO and can make those category and tag pages work FOR you, they’re working against you.

Here’s why.

Depending on how you have named your tags and categories:

• There could be duplicate content issues, where big swathes of the same content appear on similar pages.
• There could be keyword cannibalisation issues, where your category and tag pages are fighting for SEO prominence with the blog posts you’ve written, diluting the efforts of both.
• There could (rarely on smaller B2B sites, if I’m honest) be crawl budget issues, where Google has allocated a certain number of resources to crawl your site, and irrelevant pages use that budget before the crawl gets to your important pages.

Now, in a lot of cases Google will not even index these pages, but they will still crawl them.

• You’ll see them appear in you Google Search Console in the ‘Crawled not indexed’ area of the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section.
• Sometimes they’ll appear in the ‘Discovered not indexed’ area.

So, as mentioned above, unless you know how to make them work for you, the best thing to do is to ask Google not to crawl and try to index them. This is called ‘noindexing‘.

How do you do that? Well, it depends on your website platform. Here are instructions for the 3 main platforms small businesses use; WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace.

How to noindex blog tags and categories in WordPress

If you use WordPress to build your platform, then you probably use am SEO plugin (you DO use an SEO plugin, right?).

Here’s how to noindex those tags and categories in 3 of the main ones.

noindexing in Yoast

Log in to your WordPress admin system and go to the settings of your Yoast plugin.

It will look something like this:

Scroll down until you see the “Categories & Tags section on the left:

Click on categories, then disable ‘Show categories in search results’ – it is usually switched on by default and you need to switch it to off. The section in the red box is the one that you need to toggle to off – it will show a cross instead of a tick. Remember to click save, then do the same for the ‘Tags’ section.

Once this is done, resubmit your sitemap to Google Search Console so that Google picks up the changes quickly.

noindexing in All In One SEO

To noindex tags and categories in AIO SEO, go to the AIO settings page and click on ‘Search Appearance’:

Then click on the ‘Taxonomies’ tab:

In there move the ‘show in search results’ slier to No for categories and tags. Remember to save the settings, then resubmit your sitemap to Google Search Console.

noindexing in Rankmath

To noindex tags and categories in Rankmath,first open up your Rankmath Dashboard and select ‘Advanced mode':

Then, in the left hand menu, click on ‘Titles & Meta’:

Once you click on this, you should see this screen:

Clicking on ‘Categories’ and ‘Tags’ will give you the option to choose to noindex them.

If you have an SEO plugin that isn’t one of the three mentioned, a simple Google search for ‘noindex tags and categories in xxx’ should point you in the right direction.

How to noindex blog tags and categories in Wix

To noindex tags and categories in Wix, log in to your admin dashboard and navigate to the SEO settings:

?

Scroll down to SEO Settings:

?

You need to change the settings on Blog Tags and Blog Categories:

Once in the section, click on ‘Customize defaults’:

Open the ‘Robots meta tag’ option:

Then just tick ‘noindex’ – don’t forget to save!

Make sure you do Tags AND Categories.

How to noindex blog tags and categories in Squarespace

Log in to your Squarespace account and navigate to your main dashboard.

In the left hand menu, click on ‘Pages’:

Find your blog (in this case it is called ‘Thoughts’) and click on the settings cog icon:

This will open up your blog settings – click on ‘SEO’:

At the bottom of the blog SEO page you will see three options – make sure they look like this, so that pages are indexed but tags and categories aren’t:

As always, if you have an SEO Consultant or company on board, please check with them before you do anything, or ask me or someone else who knows about SEO to help if you’re unsure.

This blog post was written to support the non-wanky SEO course – my no jargon, straight talking, and definitely non-wanky course to help small businesses make the most of their website.