Hi all,

Hoping someone can help — I've been troubleshooting this for a while now.

Google isn’t indexing any pages on my forum. At first I thought everything was configured correctly, but after using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool, I discovered that Google is seeing a noindex meta tag on my pages.

The confusing part is:

• My forum SEO settings show no noindex being applied.

• Yoast SEO is installed and configured.

• Sitemap is valid and submitted.

• robots.txt isn’t blocking anything.

• No manual penalties or crawl errors.

• Pages are mobile-friendly and load fast.

• Internal linking has been improved.

• Googlebot is crawling lightly, but not indexing anything.

I’ve double-checked my settings:

• Meta Titles: Enabled

• Meta Tags: Enabled

• User Profile Page indexing: Disabled

• Forums Sitemap: Enabled

• Topics Sitemap: Enabled

• Members Sitemap: Disabled

Despite this, Google is seeing a noindex meta tag somewhere on the page source, but I can’t locate what’s injecting it.

My questions:

1. Could this be a conflict between Yoast and the forum’s built-in SEO?

2. Where else should I look for hidden noindex directives?

3. Has anyone else experienced forum software silently inserting noindex on content types, permissions, or archives?

4. Any tips for fully disabling noindex across all forum threads/pages for Google?

Any help would be massively appreciated — clearly missing something but not sure where.

Thanks!