Index, noindex or disable WordPress author and date archives

WordPress builds two kinds of listing page that nobody asked for: an author archive for every user who has published something (yoursite.com/author/jane/) and date archives for every year, month and day that has posts (yoursite.com/2026/, yoursite.com/2026/10/). From version 0.0.29, Hydrogen SEO lets you decide what happens to each of them: list them in search results, keep them out, or switch them off altogether. The settings are free and need no account.

Where the settings are

Open Hydrogen SEO → Titles & Meta and choose Archives. There is a card for Author archives and one for Date archives, each with a three-way choice:

Choice	What visitors get	What search engines get
Index	The archive, as your theme shows it	`index, follow`: the archive may appear in search results
No index	The archive, as your theme shows it	`noindex, follow`: asked to leave it out of results, while still following its links to your posts
Disabled	A 301 redirect to the homepage	The same 301, so the archive's addresses drop out of the index over time

Below each choice, the card says in a sentence what it does, and the archive's Title format sits underneath. Changes save automatically, like the rest of Titles & Meta.

The defaults keep what you had

Updating to 0.0.29 changes nothing on your site's front end:

Author archives default to No index. Hydrogen SEO always gave them noindex, follow before this version; the difference now is that you can choose otherwise.
Date archives default to Index, which is how they behaved before.

One rule sits above both settings. When Settings → Reading → Discourage search engines from indexing this site is ticked in WordPress, every page gets noindex, author and date archives included, whatever you choose here.

Which choice fits your site

Your site	Author archives	Date archives
A blog with one author	No index, or Disabled if nothing links to the author page	No index, or Disabled if your theme never links to them
A publication with several writers, each with a body of work	Index, so a search for a writer's name can find their page	No index
A business site whose blog is written by "admin" or one marketing account	Disabled	Disabled
A diary, journal or news archive where readers browse by month	Depends on the authors, as above	Index or No index; keep them reachable

The reasoning:

On a one-author blog, the author archive is the blog again, the same posts in the same order at a second address. It adds nothing a searcher needs. No index keeps it out of results; Disabled removes it.
On a multi-author site, author pages can be worth finding. Someone who searches for a writer by name, or who wants to read more from them, is well served by a page listing that writer's work. Index them, and give each author a biography in their WordPress profile so the page has something of its own.
Date archives rarely match anything people search for. "Your Site, October 2026" is not a query. They are useful to readers who browse by month on a diary-style site, which is a reason to keep them working, not a reason to have them in search results. No index suits most sites. If neither your theme nor your readers use them, Disabled is tidier.

For a longer discussion with examples, see should you noindex author and date archives?

What Disabled does

With an archive set to Disabled, every address that belongs to it redirects with a 301: pages to your homepage, and the archive's feeds to your main feed (/feed/), so feed readers still get a feed:

Archive	Addresses that redirect
Author	`/author/jane/`, its later pages such as `/author/jane/page/2/`, its feed `/author/jane/feed/`, and `?author=1`
Date	`/2026/`, `/2026/10/`, `/2026/10/15/`, their later pages, their feeds such as `/2026/10/feed/`, and `?m=202610`

A few details:

Posts are untouched. Disabling date archives does not affect posts whose permalinks contain a date, such as /2026/10/my-post/. Only the listing pages redirect.
The Title format is not used while an archive is disabled, since the page is never shown. The field stays in place, marked as not in use, so your template is still there if you switch back.
Redirects you made yourself come first. A rule in the Redirection Manager for an archive address is applied before this setting, so you can send one author's archive to an About page while the rest go to the homepage.
Previews and form submissions are not redirected, only ordinary page requests. Those few requests get noindex instead.
Searches and other archives are not affected. A search filtered by date or author (/?s=coffee&year=2026), or a category or post type archive with a date filter, keeps working. Search results stay noindex as always.

Author links in schema and the video sitemap

A disabled author archive no longer has a page to link to, so Hydrogen SEO stops linking to it:

Article schema. The author's url becomes the Website field from the user's WordPress profile (Users → Profile). If the profile has no website, the url is left out and the author is given by name only.
The video sitemap. The uploader link uses the same profile website, subject to the existing rule that the uploader page must be on the same host as the video page. Otherwise the uploader is listed by name with no link.
RSS feed text. %author_link% in the RSS feed text links to the profile website too, or prints the plain name when there is none.

Schema fields you fill with the %author_url% or %post_author_url% variable keep the author archive address. Hydrogen SEO also uses it to tell authors apart in schema, as an identifier rather than a link, so it has to stay unique per author.

Your theme is a separate matter. Many themes print the author's name as a link to the author archive in each post's byline. Those links keep their address and, once the archive is disabled, lead to the homepage through the redirect. If that is not what you want readers to get, turn off author links in your theme's settings, or use No index instead, which keeps the page working for readers.

Check the result

For No index or Index, open an archive while logged out, view the page source and find the robots tag:

html

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

For Disabled, request an archive address and look at the response:

bash

curl -sI "https://example.com/author/jane/" | grep -iE "^(HTTP|location)"

You should see 301 and a location pointing at your homepage. In Search Console, noindexed archives move to Excluded by 'noindex' tag in the Pages report, and disabled ones to Page with redirect, as Google recrawls them.

Coming from another SEO plugin

Tools → Import SEO Data brings these settings over (version 0.0.29 and later). An archive that the previous plugin switched off or redirected arrives as Disabled; otherwise its index or noindex setting arrives as Index or No index. The preview lists both before anything is written. See switch from another SEO plugin.

Performance

The settings add no database queries to any page. The redirect check is a comparison made on archive requests, before WordPress renders anything.

FAQ

My author archive was already noindex. Did I set that?

No. Hydrogen SEO gave every author archive noindex, follow before version 0.0.29, and No index is still the default. Choose Index on the Archives card if you want author pages in search results.

Can I keep author archives for readers but out of Google?

Yes. That is what No index does. Readers can open the page and follow its links; search engines are asked not to list it.

Can I send a disabled archive somewhere other than the homepage?

The setting always sends visitors to the homepage. For a particular address, add a 301 in the Redirection Manager, which is checked first: for example /author/jane/ to your team page.

Will disabling date archives break my post URLs?

No. Posts with dates in their permalinks keep working. Only the archive pages for a year, month or day redirect.

Do these settings change the XML sitemap?

No. Hydrogen SEO's XML sitemap lists posts, pages, custom post types and taxonomy archives. Author and date archives are not in it whichever choice you make, so there is nothing to add or remove. If you switch Hydrogen SEO's sitemap off and use the one WordPress builds itself, that one lists author archives only while they are set to Index.

Can I set author archives differently for each author?

Not with this setting, which covers all author archives at once. A Redirection Manager rule can still treat one author's address differently.