NoIndex & Remove Categories and Tags from Search Index

Google is continuously making changes to its algorithm to serve quality content to its users and in such an attempt, Google is penalizing websites that allow indexing of low quality pages in search results. This includes tags, categories, author & monthly archives.

Google considers these pages as duplicate as the same title & post excerpt is used across all those indexed pages.

In order to get rid of Google’s penalty, you’ll need to no-index categories and tags on your WordPress blog.

Tips: Recover from Google EMD Penalty | How to File a DMCA Complaint to Google?

How to Noindex WordPress Categories and Tags?

There are actually two ways to noindex WordPress categories, tags and archive pages.

1. Robots.txt: You can easily tell search engines not to index WordPress categories and tags just by adding the following noindex tag to your Robots.txt file.
   

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

2. Meta Robots WordPress Plugin: Install Meta Robots pluginand simply checkmark the following options
   • Author archives
   • Date-based archives
   • Category archives
   • Tag archives

Although you’ve de-indexed your categories and tags from search indexing, it will take some time for those pages to go off from the public view. However, you can manually remove these indexed category and tag pages using the Google webmaster tools.

How to Remove WordPress Category and Tag Archives via Webmaster Tools?

1. Login to your Google webmaster tools account.
2. Select your WordPress blog from the list.
3. Go to “Optimization” > Remove URLs
4. Click on “Create a new removal request” button and enter the URL.
   

   Ex: http://www.9to5blogger.com/category/ (to remove categories) or http://www.9to5blogger.com/tag/ (to remove tags)

   

5. Click “Continue” for each of the above two URL removal requests.
6. On the next screen, click on the drop-down menu and choose the reason as “Remove Directory” and click “Submit”.

That’s it! Google will now remove and/or deindex all your WordPress category and tag archives. As it will take some time to remove all these indexed pages, please be patient.