Archived topic
Adding "noindex" (only) on paginated content
5 replies · Started by raysn on January 26, 2020
Hi there,
I wonder if it would be possible to automatically add the attribute "noindex" to paginated content via a filter in the functions.php of my GP-Child theme and remove "rel=next" from the first page, so that search engines are not redirected to the subpages at all.
The background is the following: on the first page of a post (example.com/postname/) I display the whole content with several subheadings. This content should also be indexed by the search engines. Via <!--nextpage--> I divide the post into further subpages with only one heading each, i.e. example.com/postname/2/ etc. I use these subpages mainly to point users in social media only to a certain part of the content. For the search engines, these subpages /2/, /3/, etc. are completely unnecessary and generate a lot of duplicate content at this point. They don't have to appear as single subpages in the search results, since I have the central landing page example.com/postname/ for this. Therefore, I would like to add the attribute "noindex" only to these subpages, but not to the landing page.
In addition, it would certainly make sense to filter out "rel=next" from the landing page as well, since otherwise crawl budget would be wasted unnecessarily and the subpages would be "invisible" to the search engines anyway.
What do I have to add to functions.php to achieve this? At https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-add-noindex-nofollow-on-paginated-content/ I found a solution, but there are functions of the plugin "SEO Framework" mentioned, which I don't use... I would definitely prefer a solution without additional plugin.
Thank you for your efforts!
Greets
Raysn
Hi there,
You might be able to do something like this:
add_action( 'wp_head', function() {
global $numpages;
if ( is_singular() && $numpages > 1 ) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex">';
}
} );
add_action( 'wp', function() {
global $numpages;
if ( is_singular() && $numpages > 1 ) {
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head', 10, 0 );
}
} );Hi Tom,
thanks for your response!
Unfortunately, that doesn't work for me. I guess that's because the Yoast plugin overwrites general WordPress settings. I forgot to mention that I have the plugin in use.
On the first page example.com/postname nothing seems to have changed in the head section (rel="next" is still there), on the second, the paginated page, I now have two meta robots:
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1"> (probably what Yoast creates) and below <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> (added via the filter in functions.php)
Do you have an idea for a workaround? I have looked at https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/api/ and probably (if I understood correctly) wpseo_next_rel_link and the filter wpseo_robots should be changed... but I don't know exactly what to do.
By the way, I have already implemented a button to navigate through the paginated pages by using the following information in functions.php (I have already found the snippet here in the help section):
add_filter( 'wp_link_pages_args', 'lh_wp_link_pages' );
function lh_wp_link_pages( $args ) {
$args['next_or_number'] = 'next';
$args['before'] = '<div style="text-align: center;">';
return $args;
}What is the easiest way to hide this button on the first page (example.com/postname)?
Thanks for your input!
Greets
Raysn
It seems Yoast used to have this option but removed it: https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/
You may need to contact their support to see if it's possible to filter their default behavior.
Hm, unfortunately I don't use a premium version of Yoast. And apparently Yoast's support always refers to the article you linked to the same question anyway. I try to find a solution myself. Now that I have turned Yoast off for testing and used the code you mentioned, strangely enough not even the meta-robots attribute for /2/ has been added, which worked when Yoast was still active. Anyway, let's see if I can fix this somehow. If I find a solution, I will post this here.
If they have a filter available where we can alter the default index/noindex, that would be best. Their support should be able to point to that filter if it exists.
