[Sarah]

I discovered today on a high traffic Woo client’s website that many types of complex search parameters are missing the noindex meta tag that WordPress core is supposed to enable on search results… not sure if this is caused by one of their plugins or if its a bug in Woo but it caused a huge amount of Google GSC errors:

Duplicate without user-selected canonical

[Alexis]

I don’t remember which WP Core version added that meta tag. But its definitely supposed to exist for internal search results.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-do-i-add-noindex-nofollow-to-all-search-results-pages/

[Katherine]

Examples of what I’m talking about:

Has noindex meta tag:

https://example.com/?s=flowers

Missing noindex meta tag:

https://example.com/?s=flowers&post_type=product

[Hannah]

no good….

[Judith]

is that caused by Woo filters?

==> https://wordpress.org/support/topic/noindex-on-woocommerce-filters/

[Joshua]

I think filters are an entirely different parameter, not /s=...

[Scott]

UPDATE:

Okay, SlickStack now force-noindexes any URLs that begin with /?s= no matter what, in case WooCommerce or other plugins are screwing with it.

This enforces clean indexing and noindexing practices along with some of the other existing rules in our Nginx config:

https://github.com/littlebizzy/slickstack/blob/master/modules/nginx/sites/production.txt

Any feedback please let us know on GitHub or on the forums.

[Donald]

how exactly does SlickStack force noindexing?

[Author]

Posts