How To Make Your WordPress Blog Category And Tag Pages NoIndex

If you use (self-hosted) WordPress blog as your blogging platform then you must have many tags and categories got created in your blog. And if you don’t know then they are creating many duplicate content of your original post inside your same blog. So it is always suggested adding noindex meta tag in your blog’s tags, categories, author, archives and search page.

So to add noindex meta tag in your blog all you need to add any one of the following code in your blog’s theme’s header.php file, before closing head tag.

<?php if (is_author() || is_date() || is_search() || is_category() || is_tag()) echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />'; ?>

OR

<?php if ((is_author() || is_date() || is_search() || is_category() || is_tag()) && ($paged>1)) echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />'; ?>

First one will put noindex,follow meta tag for all your blog’s tags, categories, author, archives and search pages. And for second one it will add noindex,follow meta tag for your blog’s tags, categories, author, archives and search page expect first page. E.g.: In this blog check the first page of DropBox tag page which don’t contain noindex,follow meta tag but you will able to find it in second page by viewing the source code.

NOINDEX: – By putting NOINDEX meta tag it will block search engine to put that page in search result and if it is already in Search Engine Result Page (SERP) then they will remove it when they will crawl that page next time.
FOLLOW: – By FOLLOW meta tag search engine bots will follow the links in that page even if that page contain NOINDEX meta tag. But that page won’t get indexed in SERP.

I won’t suggest you to install any plugin for this because it can make your blog heavy. But in case of you are already using WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast then go to their Indexation settings page (from your blog dashboard), from there under Indexation Rules, select the check box according to your need.

It may take time to get in effect depending on when Google will again crawl all those pages.

In reply to Aman.