What If I told you I was able to increase the indexation of all my blogs by over 40% and  increase organic search traffic by over 28% by simply leveraging the Robots Meta Tag inside WordPress? Let me explain…

The Robots Meta Tag is a powerful tool for SEO’s and webmasters to help better communicate to search engines which pages they do not want indexed and searchable to the outside world. “Why would I ever want a page on my site to not be indexed by search engines?” Good question. It totally depends on your site.

In the case of blogs, I have found through experience that all of those extra Tag, date, and author archives with all the sub-pages associated with it (/page/2, /page/3 etc.) tend to hurt the overall value of your site more than they help. They spread your site too thin with almost duplicate content all over the place.

However you still may want to keep those pages around in case users want to browse your site through those avenues.

FYI = Google’s webmaster central blog put together a great how-to article on the Robots Meta Tag. I recommend checking it out.

So with every WordPress blog or site that I run I make sure to Meta NOINDEX the following:

- Search results pages

- Date based archives

- Tag archives

- Author archives

- All Admin pages

- Login and Register pages

- Subpages of the Homepage

- Subpages of Archives and Taxonomies

How is it that I actually accomplish this? No secret really. Yoast created a plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast which has an Indexation feature where you can quickly select a few checkboxes that will add the Meta Noindex tag to these sections of your WordPress site.

This is a perfect example of a small task that produces huge results in SEO.

Screenshot of WordPress SEO by Yoast in action: