I’m experiencing an SEO issue where the blog tags on our site are being excluded from Google’s index due to a ‘noindex’ tag set through Yoast SEO. While we want to keep the tags visible on the blog for users to follow, we need to ensure that they are marked as “nofollow” to avoid them being indexed. This should be a permanent change that remains intact even after theme updates or future site modifications. The current setting in Yoast marks them as “noindex,” but they still appear as “follow” links in the blog template. We need a solution to globally set these tags as “nofollow” without affecting their visibility or requiring changes with each site update. The issue can be observed in the blog article at “https://globalwarmingisreal.com/2023/10/19/geothermal-energy-africa-hidden-green-energy-gem/”.
3 screenshots for reference: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/hg0g87wle5m9pnwt64kpy/h?rlkey=33gd5gpi7vwyd087ry4cf186d&dl=0
Ty for any help you can provide!
Internal linking does not need to be “nofollow” — Google bots still follow all the links regardless. What matters is the META data on the tag page itself, which Yoast should override to say “noindex” which is what Google cares about. Meaning, if you have a link to tag page from a story, that links to tag page which is marked noindex and the tag links back to the original story page with canonical link in the meta, you’re fine.
Yoast will also keep the tag pages out of the sitemap, based on the toggle being ‘off’.
This has been our experience anyway. (I started doing SEO in 1995, if that matters.) 🙂
