Should You Noindex Author and Date Archives in WordPress?

Most WordPress SEO checklists include a line like "noindex author and date archives", and for a lot of sites it is the right call. But it is a rule of thumb, not a law, and it gets two kinds of site wrong: publications whose writers are worth finding by name, and sites where the archives should not exist at all. This guide works through the decision for each archive type, shows how to check what yours are doing today, and covers the switch-off option that noindex advice usually skips.

What these pages are

WordPress generates both kinds without being asked:

• Author archives live at /author/username/, with later pages at /author/username/page/2/ and a feed at /author/username/feed/. The address ?author=1 reaches the same archive by user ID. One exists for every user with at least one published post.
• Date archives exist for every year, month and day with a post: /2026/, /2026/10/, /2026/10/15/, plus their later pages and feeds, and ?m=202610 in the plain-permalink form.

Both are listing pages. They show posts that already have their own pages, in date order, with whatever introduction your theme adds, which is usually none.

Three options, not two

The usual framing is index or noindex. There is a third choice worth having:

Noindex is the cautious middle. It keeps a page working for the people who click through to it from your own site, while keeping it out of results. Switching off is tidier but has consequences, covered below.

Author archives: decide by how many authors you have

One author. On a personal blog, /author/yourname/ lists every post on the site in the same order as the blog index. It duplicates the blog page by page. Search engines usually work out which one to show, but there is no reason to offer them the choice. Noindex at least; switch it off if your theme doesn't link to it or you can turn those links off.

The same goes for a business blog where every post is published by one account, whether that is "admin", "marketing" or a former employee. An author page for "admin" is not something anyone wants to land on. Switching it off is usually best.

Several authors, each with a body of work. Here the author archive can be the best page on your site for a query: the writer's name. People search for journalists, columnists and recipe developers by name, and a page listing everything someone has written for you answers that search well. It also supports what readers and search engines look for when they ask who wrote something.

Index them, and make them worth indexing:

• Write a biography in each user's profile under Users → Profile → Biographical Info. Most themes print it at the top of the author archive, which turns a list into a page about a person.
• Make sure bylines link to the archive, so the page is reachable and has internal links.
• Consider whether contributors with one or two posts need an indexed page. If several are like that, the setting covers all authors at once, so weigh the strong pages against the thin ones. A redirect for an individual address is the way to handle a few exceptions.

Several authors, but nobody searches for them. A company blog with posts from six staff members is technically multi-author, but if those people are not known outside the company, their archives are no more useful in search than a single author's. Noindex.

Date archives: almost always noindex

A month archive answers a question almost nobody asks a search engine. "Brew Notes, March 2024" is not a query anyone types, and the page contains nothing that is not already on the individual posts, the blog index and the category pages. That makes date archives a common source of thin, duplicated pages, and a site that has posted every month for ten years has 120 month archives alone.

Noindex suits nearly every site. The exceptions are rare:

• A diary or journal where readers genuinely browse by month and some of those pages have earned links.
• A news or events archive where the date itself is the subject.

The choice between noindex and switching off depends on whether anything uses them. Many themes include an Archives widget listing months in the sidebar, and some readers do click those. If yours does, noindex keeps those links working. If the widget is gone and nothing else links to date archives, switching them off removes a few hundred pointless addresses.

Switching off date archives does not touch posts whose permalinks include the date, such as /2026/10/my-post/. Only the listing pages go.

Before you change anything: check your data

Five minutes in Search Console will tell you whether you are about to throw anything away.

1. In Performance → Search results, add a Page filter with URLs containing /author/. Look at clicks over the last 12 months. For date archives, choose Custom (regex) in the page filter and use /20\d\d/(\d\d/)?(\d\d/)?$, which matches year, month and day archives but not posts.
2. In Indexing → Pages, look for author and date URLs in the indexed list and in Excluded by 'noindex' tag. This tells you what search engines are currently doing with them.
3. Note any archive address with real clicks or known backlinks. Those deserve a specific decision, not the default.

On most sites the answer is that author and date archives get close to no clicks. That makes the decision easy. If one author page does get traffic, that is a reason to index author archives, or at least to redirect that one address somewhere better rather than to the homepage.

What switching off involves

A switched-off archive sends visitors and crawlers to the homepage with a 301. That is more than hiding it, so check four things first:

• Bylines. Many themes link the author's name in each post to their archive. After switching off, those links lead to the homepage. Turn off author links in the theme if that would confuse readers.
• Widgets and menus. Remove any archive widget or menu item that points at date or author pages.
• Structured data. Article markup normally gives each author a url pointing at their archive. That should not point at a redirect. Use the author's own website, or leave the URL out.
• Specific addresses with value. If one author's archive has backlinks, redirect it to a better page, such as a team or about page, before switching the rest off.

Doing it in Hydrogen SEO

From version 0.0.29, Hydrogen SEO → Titles & Meta → Archives has a card for author archives and one for date archives, each with Index, No index and Disabled. Author archives default to No index and date archives to Index, matching what earlier versions did, so updating changes nothing until you choose.

Disabled redirects the archive's later pages, feeds and query-string forms (?author=1, ?m=202610) to the homepage along with the archive itself. With author archives disabled, the Article schema's author url and the video sitemap's uploader link switch to the website in the author's profile, and are left out when there is none, which takes care of the structured data point above. Redirects in the Redirection Manager are checked first, which takes care of the specific addresses. Bylines in your theme are still the theme's to change.

The setting-by-setting reference is in author and date archives.

After the change

Nothing dramatic should happen, and that is the measure of success. As Google recrawls, noindexed archives move into Excluded by 'noindex' tag in the Pages report, and switched-off ones into Page with redirect. Neither status is an error. Your posts, categories and homepage keep ranking as they did, now without a second copy of the blog listed under each author and month.

A quick summary to take away: