WordPress: Add `noindex` for Category and Tag Pages

Gatsby

Introduction

WordPress is powerful out of the box, but it generates a number of auto-generated pages that can negatively impact your SEO if not managed carefully. One of the most common culprits? Category and tag archive pages.

These taxonomy pages list all the posts associated with a particular category or tag. While they are useful for internal site navigation, they are often considered “thin content” by search engines and can lead to content duplication and wasted crawl budget.

In this guide, we’ll explore why these pages can be problematic for SEO, how to identify if they’re indexed by Google, and various ways to add a noindex directive to these pages to clean up your site’s presence in search engines.

Why Are Category and Tag Pages a Problem?

By default, WordPress creates a separate URL for each category and tag:
– https://example.com/category/news/
– https://example.com/tag/seo-tips/

These archive pages usually include excerpts or full content from several posts but lack unique content themselves. Over time, especially for large blogs, this can generate hundreds or even thousands of low-value pages for Google to crawl and index.

Problems Caused by Category/Tag Pages:

  • Duplicate Content: If full content is shown on both the archive and post pages, Google may see this as duplicate content.
  • Diluted Link Equity: Internal and external links pointing to these pages instead of your most valuable content can weaken your site’s overall SEO.
  • Wasted Crawl Budget: Google may spend its crawl resources on low-value pages instead of indexing your best content.
  • Index Bloat: Too many indexed pages that don’t provide value can hurt the perceived quality of your site.

Real-World Example:

Let’s say your blog has 100 posts and you use 5 tags per post. That could result in 500 tag pages. Now imagine Googlebot crawling and indexing each one of those pages, all of which contain very similar content. This doesn’t help Google understand your site and can dilute your SEO rankings.

To see how many of these are already indexed:

site:yourdomain.com

Search this in Google and look for results like:
– https://yourdomain.com/category/technology/
– https://yourdomain.com/tag/wordpress/

Are these bringing in traffic or ranking for meaningful keywords? If not, they might be better off de-indexed.

How to Add noindex to Category and Tag Pages

There are multiple ways to tell search engines not to index taxonomy archive pages.

Option 1: Using an SEO Plugin (Yoast or Rank Math)

Yoast SEO:

  1. Go to your WordPress admin dashboard.
  2. Navigate to SEO > Search Appearance.
  3. Click on the Taxonomies tab.
  4. Under Categories and Tags, set “Show in search results?” to No.
  5. Save the settings.

This will automatically insert the following meta tag into your HTML:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Rank Math:

  1. Go to Rank Math > Titles & Meta.
  2. Under the Taxonomies tab, find Categories and Tags.
  3. Enable the Noindex toggle for each.
  4. Save changes.

Note: These plugins also handle canonical URLs and sitemaps properly, which helps prevent additional SEO issues.

Option 2: Add Code to functions.php

If you don’t want to use a plugin, you can add this snippet to your theme’s functions.php file:

function add_noindex_to_taxonomies() {
    if (is_category() || is_tag()) {
        echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">';
    }
}
add_action('wp_head', 'add_noindex_to_taxonomies');

This will manually insert a noindex meta tag for all category and tag archive pages.

⚠️ Important: Always use a child theme or backup your site before editing core theme files.

Option 3: Use robots.txt (Not Recommended)

Some people attempt to block taxonomy pages using robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/

However, this only prevents crawling and does not prevent indexing. Google might still index these URLs if it finds links pointing to them. Using noindex in the HTML is more reliable.

How to Confirm noindex Is Working

Method 1: Check the HTML Source

  1. Open a category or tag URL.
  2. Right-click the page and select View Page Source.
  3. Search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for the word robots.
  4. You should see:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Method 2: Google Search Console

  1. Go to Google Search Console
  2. Click on URL Inspection.
  3. Enter a tag or category URL.
  4. Click Test Live URL to verify indexing and meta tag status.

Should You Always noindex Category and Tag Pages?

Not always. Here are a few scenarios where keeping them indexed might make sense:

✅ You Should Keep Them Indexed If:

  • You have added custom, unique content to category/tag pages.
  • You are ranking for long-tail keywords via these pages.
  • Your taxonomy pages have inbound links and bring in traffic.

❌ You Should Use noindex If:

  • You display full content on archive pages (causing duplication).
  • You have hundreds of tag pages with overlapping content.
  • Your category/tag pages aren’t generating traffic or ranking.

Pro Tip: Check your Google Analytics or Search Console to see if these pages bring meaningful traffic before making changes.

Final Thoughts

Adding noindex to your WordPress category and tag archive pages can dramatically improve your site’s SEO hygiene. It prevents unnecessary indexing, eliminates duplicate content issues, and ensures Google focuses on your most valuable content.

If you’re just starting out, using a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math is the easiest and safest route. For advanced users, modifying functions.php offers complete control.

References

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