Do you index subpages?

[MayankParmar]

In March, Yoast started indexing the subpages of homepage, categories, tags, authors. As you all know, this causes duplicate and low-quality content.

Yoast is forcing this. We don't have any option to disable indexing of subpages.

Do you think it's a good idea to index such pages? If yes, why?

[RedBar]

As you all know

No, I don't, and I'm sure many others do not.

Why use it (Yoast) when you know it's creating you problems?

[keyplyr]

Yoast may be responsible for more than you think:

[yoast.com...]

[searchenginejournal.com...]

[MayankParmar]

@RedBar Because it's good. Never faced any single problem with them, but they are forcing us to index subpages because they think it's good. It should be optional. The problem started from March.

@keyplyr Yes, and Google indexed thousands of attachment pages in my case as I update to new plugin version after one week of its release (to avoid possible bugs). If Yoast had acknowledged it and explained everything on second day, I would have installed the new version.

[Pontificus Maximux]

The reason Yoast stopped supporting the "noindex" of paginated pages, categories ect. is because John Mueller has said that Google is now treating no indexed pages as soft 404's and that the links on those pages will no longer be "followed."

Barry covered this.
[seroundtable.com...]

[tangor]

One reason why the often vilified robots.txt should be up to date and in depth. G and B support and respect robots.txt, thus even the yoast faus pax could have been prevented.

[QuaterPan]

I doubt that nowadays Google penalizes a site for thin pages. It just doesn't index them , and of course it means that if your site is made only of thin page, then of course it won't show in the index, which can be seen as a penalization. All it does is wasting bandwidth , and while Google bot crawl these page that it is ignoring, it is not indexing your more important pages.

Also, lost of ranking is not immediate, it takes weeks, month or a whole year. Those who are seeing immediate lost or ranking (or improvement), this is coincidence with algorithm changes/experimentation.