RankMath SEO Noindexing Pages By Mistake
If you are having trouble with pages being no-indexed on your WordPress website and you are using Rankmath SEO, this blog might fix you issue.
We just launched a client’s redesigned website and we got a notification from Google search console that over 100 pages on were set to no-index including many of their service pages AKA they would lose rankings/business very quickly. I used 4-5 SEO tools to scan the website and NONE of them said anything was wrong with the pages that GOOGLE said were set to no index. I believe this is because all the tools check the “robots” setting, which was correct on all of the pages we checked.
After checking Rankmath’s support about indexing, we determined all settings were in fact correct. We went into the source code of the pages and control+F and found a weird line of code relating to the rank math SEO plugin wordpress admin bar and found this “top admin bar” setting.
Now seeing the code related to the admin bar, we went to the front end of the page to check the admin bar setting but there was no “check mark” that shows the admin bar was setting the page to noindex either.
This is what the page would look like when it IS set to no index.
So with that out, instead we thought maybe we can get rid of the admin bar all together. We Google’d how to turn off that admin bar and found the setting which is under RankMatch > Role Manager > Top admin bar. We turned it off, checked, and the code went away!
We tested a page and resubmitted it to Google search console, and sure enough, the page was no longer set to no index and google accepted the page to be indexed again, fixing the problem.
We tested this on 3-4 other sites and it happened on them too, so this is a widespread issue if you are using this plugin.
We submitted this bug to Rankmath and hopefully they fix it too.
What I think this means is that because the “no index” setting is in the wrong place of the code (not near the robots line), that’s why this is undetectable by most SEO tools.
What this also means that Google is reading any “noindex” code found on a page of the website, regardless if it’s near the meta name=”robots” tag or not.
Hope this helps!
