Google Ignoring noindex on Pagination Pages

[roimarketing]

Hi There,

I have an issue with my wordpress blog in that Google is ignoring my noindex tag on all pages off the main and category pages. Each page has:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

You can see if you go to page 2 or 3 from the homepage (in my profile) that all of these pages are indexed despite the tag (when I just want the first page indexed).

Google is also showing the wrong title tags.

Anyone know how to fix this or why its happened?

Thanks,
ROI Marketing

[edited by: lorax at 8:11 pm (utc) on Mar 10, 2014]

[lorax]

So you don't want Google to index anything or just the homepage of the WordPress install?

Why not just use htaccess and disallow everything but the home page?

[lucy24]

Second question is easy: If google thinks it can make up a better title than the one you gave the page, it will do so. There have been past threads about it. There's not a thing you can do.

Are your blog articles accessible in an all-in-one single-page version?

[roimarketing]

Lorax,

I want every article and all other pages followed just not the paginated version of categories (and the homepage), ie:
- /articles/category/cro/ - Indexed
- /articles/category/cro/page/2/ - Not Indexed, Followed (so all posts on these pages still get indexed).

I have the tags in place above so im just curious as to why they are being ignored.

No blog articles aren't accessible in an all in one page.

In 3.1 on this guide to best practice SEO for wordpress he implements something similar which means people will always land on the main category page, not page 2 or 3: [yoast.com...]

Thanks,
ROI Marketing

[not2easy]

Are the paginated versions showing in your sitemaps? Besides renaming your pages as mentioned, they will consider anything in a sitemap as pages you want indexed.

[roimarketing]

Not using a sitemap at all!

[phranque]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, roimarketing!


What is GWT showing you?

[roimarketing]

Sorry for the delay getting back to you phranque, nothing of interest in GWT, I could exclude the pages manually but prefer to solve the issue to avoid problems in the future!

Search term: site:roimarketing.co.nz /page/2/

Page Code:
view-source:http://www.roimarketing.co.nz/articles/category/web-design/page/2/

No Index Tag:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

Any ideas?

[getcooking]

I don't know if this matters or not, but your noindex tag uses "backwards" quotes (sorry, don't know the official name for those) instead of regular quote marks. If you copied/pasted the tag from another source, try retyping it manually. I have a plugin for the Chrome browser that shows me noindexed pages and it didn't detect the noindex tag on your paginated category pages - most likely because of those quote marks. Again, I don't know if that matters or not to Google but that is the only thing I see amiss in the code.

[roimarketing]

Good spotting, have updated that tag now and will see if it makes a difference, thanks.

[lorax]

ROI - apologies for the delayed reply. If WMT doesn't show any issues then I'd look to see if backticks that getcooking found bring about a change after you fix them. I'm not sure if Google cares about them or not but it will be a good experiment to learn from. Please let us know what happens.