What Are WordPress Pagination Archives Best SEO Settings?

What Are WordPress Pagination Archives Best SEO Settings? I wonder how many times you have searched Google to find out the best settings for paginated archives for a WordPress website?

Index, noindex, follow, nofollow?

It is a topic that is well discussed and debated amongst the SEO community and there are a lot of differing views on this subject.

Noindex Tag In WordPress Websites For Good SEO

So What Are WordPress Pagination Archives Best SEO Settings?

There is always a perceived problem with duplicate content when it comes to Archives and we know that it is not smart to have lots of duplicate content on any website.

Up until now, it was good practice to noindex the subsequent pages (like page2, page 3, etc.) to stop the duplicate content problem and maybe this is how you have them setup on your own website.

You can easily noindex these pages using many of the WordPress SEO plugins that are available, free or paid.

When To Use The Noindex Tag

New Directive From Google

Google’s John Mueller explained that long term noindex, follow commands will eventually equate to a noindex, nofollow directive as well.

This means that eventually Google will stop going to the page because of the noindex, remove it from the index and thus not be able to follow the links on that page.

That’s not good!

This is a major shift and you need to take action now to let all of your Archive pages be indexed and followed.

Also check if you have other pages and posts and taxonomies noindexed and if they should now be indexed instead.

Google is getting progressively smarter!

See also delete wordpress theme.