How to noindex tag and category archives in WordPress

Step by step

1. Check which archives get search traffic

In Search Console, open Performance → Search results, add a Page filter for URLs containing /tag/, and look at clicks and impressions over the last few months. Do the same for /category/, or for your category URLs if you removed the base. Archives with real clicks are candidates to keep. Archives with none are candidates to noindex.

2. Look at what the archives contain

Open a handful of tag pages. If most show one to three posts, or the same posts as a category, they are thin content. A category page with a written introduction and a clear set of posts is worth indexing. A tag used once, years ago, is not.

3. Noindex the whole taxonomy

1. Open Hydrogen SEO → Robots.
2. In the Taxonomies table, find Tags (or any custom taxonomy).
3. Switch on Noindex. Leave Nofollow off so crawlers still follow links from those pages to your posts.
4. Changes save automatically.

The Hydrogen SEO → Sitemap screen then shows a NoIndex badge on that taxonomy, and its sitemap is left out.

4. Keep exceptions indexed

If one tag or category earns traffic, override the default for that term. Open the term under Posts → Tags or Posts → Categories, click Hydrogen SEO → Edit SEO settings and set its robots options in the sheet. Per-term settings always win over the taxonomy default. Give kept archives a proper description and title so they read as landing pages.

5. Let empty archives handle themselves

Noindex Empty Archives under Hydrogen SEO → Titles & Meta → General is on by default. Categories, tags and other terms with no posts get noindex and are left out of the sitemap, unless the term has its own robots settings. There is nothing to do here unless someone switched it off.

6. Or add noindex with code

Without an SEO plugin, the wp_robots filter (WordPress 5.7 and later) does the same for tag archives:

add_filter( 'wp_robots', function ( $robots ) {
    if ( is_tag() ) {
        $robots['noindex'] = true;
        $robots['follow']  = true;
    }
    return $robots;
} );

7. Confirm and wait for the recrawl

Open a tag archive while logged out, view the source and check the robots meta tag includes noindex. Make sure robots.txt does not block /tag/, or Google cannot see the tag. Over the following weeks the archives move to Excluded by 'noindex' tag in the Pages report.

Clean up tags instead of hiding them

Noindex hides the symptom. If you have hundreds of one-post tags, the better long-term fix is fewer tags: merge near-duplicates such as "SEO tip" and "SEO tips", delete tags used once, and redirect any deleted tag that has backlinks to its closest category in Hydrogen SEO → Redirections. Going forward, decide on a short list of tags and stick to it.

Common mistakes

• Noindexing categories that bring traffic because a checklist said archives are thin. Check the data first.
• Noindexing and nofollowing together. Nofollow stops crawlers following links to your posts from those pages. Use noindex with follow.
• Blocking archives in robots.txt instead of noindexing them. Blocked pages cannot pass the noindex along, and can stay indexed.
• Forgetting custom taxonomies. WooCommerce product tags and plugin taxonomies appear in the same table and often need the same treatment.