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:
-
Could this be a conflict between Yoast and the forum’s built-in SEO?
-
Where else should I look for hidden noindex directives?
-
Has anyone else experienced forum software silently inserting noindex on content types, permissions, or archives?
-
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!
