Archive pages should be noindex

[porton]

Archive pages like ​https://teachsector.com/2022/ should be noindex.

They are not noindex in WordPress. Well, I have AIOSEO installed, and this may be an ill-effect of AIOSEO, may not it?

[audrasjb]

Hello and thank you for opening this ticket,

First, could you please explain why such archives should use noindex? Those are regular pages of the website, and it wouldn't be an universal practice to noindex these pages :)

Also, this website is used to report issues with WordPress Core, so it is not the place to discuss plugin behavior. If your issue is related to a plugin, it's probably better to ask the author in their support forum :)

[porton]

They should be noindex, because archive pages are bad as landing pages (imagine, Google leads you to an archive page, how will you find the necessary information). Better landing pages are post pages.

Also archive page in search results means mix of keywords from several pages, grouped by year, that's not good for sensible search.

So category and archives should be noindex,follow.

Also making them noindex reduces content duplication and thus may raise site rating.

[audrasjb]

Your statement is not universal, it doesn't apply to every website.
Some websites don't have any page (except a privacy policy or a contact page), so Category and Date archives are very important for them. These archives page are what they would call "landing pages).

It is not a very good idea to suggest a general SEO policy for WordPress based only on your use case. Please consider that your suggestion can be applied to millions of websites :)

I don't say noindex on archive pages is bad. I say that it depends, and that WordPress shouldn't be opinionated about this.

If you want to add noindex to your archive pages because it's better in your use case, you can use any SEO plugin. All the good SEO plugins provide a feature to selectively noindex templates.

Concerning duplicate content, this is addressed by WordPress Core using rel="canonical" where appropriate.

[peterwilsoncc]

I agree with the comment above, altering how sites are indexed by search engines is best managed via a plugin.

Apart from the single setting to allow or prevent sites appearing in search engines, WordPress can't assume which pages are best indexed as there isn't a universal rule.

An exception is made for search results (by default indexing is prevented) as spammers can manipulate those pages via spammy search terms containing a URL to their dodgy sites.

If you don't wish to use a full SEO plugin then you can use the ​wp_robots hook.

I've closed this ticket as wontfix which is trac's term to indicate that there are no plans to make any code changes at this time.