were experiencing a strange issue with a wordpress sites meta robots tag. All pages have the following meta tag and we cant seem to remove it
i Developed an E commerce site for a client and i was stacked with this issue for more than a week, all pages were indexed except for the Home Page.
After a long debugging of Yoast Seo Plugin, i got a solution for you guys.
SOLUTION The Homepage has a search page on it (for searching for products). By default, Yoast disables 'index' meta tag for Search Page and 404 Page. funny enough if your homepage has a search page or search functionality on it, your site may not be indexed by google or any other search engine.
To fix this default by Yoast SEO Plugin, follow the following steps:
STEP 1: Log into your cpanel and navigate to /public_html/yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/nameOfTheTheme/functions.php add this line of code to your theme's function.php file (at the top of the page)
/**
* EDITED BY OBOT ERNEST
* REMOVES NOINDEX META TAG FROM HOME PAGE & SEARCH PAGE IMPLEMENTED BY YOAST
*/
add_filter('wpseo_robots', 'yoast_no_home_noindex', 999);
function yoast_no_home_noindex($string= "") {
if (is_home() || is_front_page() || is_search()) {
$string= "index,follow";
}
return $string;
}
After pasting the code, save and close file.
STEP 2 Note this second step is for those that are using any of the following SEO plugins (Yoast Premium, Yoast Free or wordpress-seo-premium plugin)
Navigate to: /public_html/youwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-seo-premium/frontend/class-frontend.php
replace the code at line 713 with this one below here:
if ( is_search() ) {
$robots['index'] = 'index';
}
if ( is_404() ) {
$robots['index'] = 'noindex';
}
Save file and close
Congratulations! you just made it. It working perfectly guys!