Yoast Removed NoIndex for archive sub-pages

I’ve been away from the scene, I’ll admit. Today, I started browsing through the Google Search engine. That classy site:yoursite; brings up an influx of links and posts so that you get an idea of what the world sees. Boy, was I not happy!

This is what greeted me
/page/6
/page/7

Thanks to that I am having a ton of useless pages show up in Google and duplicate titles! I was tempted to stop using the plugin altogether or go back to an old favorite but—- a user posted a workaround for this issue right here.

Yoast, of course, clarified his reason for removing the feature in the first place.

There are now two solutions to the problem mentioned above.

Manually Adding NoIndex, Follow for Subpages

You can manually add the code to your functions.php or preferably using code snippets, a plugin that is a personal favorite of mine!

function gk_subpage_fix() {
if(is_paged()) echo ”;}
add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘gk_subpage_fix’);

Yoast’s Fix for Duplicate Titles and Meta Descriptions

We are going to introduce what is known as a snippet variable which can be found in Yoast Seo > Search Appearance and under Title Separator > Homepage

After your Seo Title, you would add %%page%% as well as before your meta description.

Example:  

Meepingblog – Site Description %%page%%

%%page%% Meta description about your website.

Your titles would now read Your Site –  Site’s Description – page 2 of 50 as opposed to Your Site – Site’s Description for all pages. Same applies to Meta Descriptions.

Important: If you have the Categories and Tag pages indexed, insert the snippet variable %%page%% into your titles and descriptions as well. Taxonomies are to be found in Yoast Seo >  Search Appearance > Taxonomies