Bulk NoIndex & NoFollow Toolkit

Description

Developed by Mad Fish Digital, this plugin saves webmasters time when finding and removing thin pages from search engine indexes.

The plugin provides an interface to sort posts by word count and character count, then bulk noindex or nofollow them. Categories and terms can be sorted by post count and managed the same way. Author archive URLs can now also be managed from a dedicated tab — useful for controlling whether author pages appear in search results.

Please Keep in Mind

After a page or category is noindexed, it can take search engines up to a few weeks before the page stops appearing in the search index. The amount of time will depend on how frequently a search engine crawls your website. We recommend using Google Search Console to further analyze how your pages appear in the search index.

Advantages

1) Reduce the time it takes to NoIndex/NoFollow each page, post, category, or author URL manually

2) Sort posts and pages by word count and character count to quickly identify thin content

3) Sort categories and tags by their number of associated posts

4) Manage NoIndex and NoFollow directives for author archive URLs from a dedicated Authors tab

5) Speed up search engine penalty recovery by bulk noindexing large numbers of posts and pages

6) Quickly noindex content identified by web crawlers such as Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl

7) Visualize all posts’, pages’, categories’, and authors’ noindex and nofollow statuses at a glance

8) Syncs with Rank Math, Yoast SEO, and AIOSEO to maintain and manage your existing robots directives

Support

For support related inquiries, visit the Mad Fish Digital plugin support page to drop us a line or ask a question. Please note that responses to specific inquiries may take up to 24 hours.

Why would you want to remove a bulk amount of pages from search indexes?

At Mad Fish Digital, we use tools like Screaming Frog, LinkResearch Tools, Ahrefs, and SEM Rush to crawl and analyze web pages. Sometimes, you want to remove multiple web pages from a search engine’s index that contain no longer current content, old products and services, or outdated guidelines/regulations. In many of these cases, you need the pages to be temporarily dropped from Google’s index today, but may want to update the content at a later date. By noindexing a post or page, you can avoid having to set the status code of those pages to 404 (or 410).

This is where having a tool to bulk noindex/nofollow these pages can become handy. You can easily remove pages from the search index, then remove the noindex directive once the content has been updated.

This plugin allows you to bulk edit the meta robots index and follow directives for your site’s posts, pages, categories, and author archive URLs. This tool is compatible with your existing Rank Math, Yoast SEO, and AIOSEO settings. Syncing of category noindex/nofollow settings with Yoast and AIOSEO is not yet supported.

By keeping your pages in sync with the noindex/nofollow settings for Rank Math, Yoast, and AIOSEO, you never have to worry about duplicating efforts or which plugin is managing your robots directives.

Fallback Protection

If you disable your Rank Math, Yoast, or AIOSEO plugins, this plugin will continue to serve the appropriate meta robots tag based on the noindex/nofollow settings configured through the interface.

If you do disable any of these plugins, be sure to check the Bulk NoIndex/NoFollow interface (Tools menu) to confirm that your posts, pages, and author URLs are still noindexed and nofollowed accordingly. Robots directives set directly through the WP post editing interface may not always be tracked by this plugin if those SEO plugins were previously enabled but are later disabled.

Installation & Usage

1) Login as an administrator to your WordPress Admin account. Using the “Add New” menu option under the “Plugins” section of the navigation, you can either search for: “Bulk NoIndex & NoFollow Tool” or if you’ve downloaded the plugin already, click the “Upload” link, find the .zip file you downloaded and then click “Install Now”. Or you can unzip and FTP upload the plugin to your plugins directory.

2) Navigate to Tools -> Bulk NoIndex/NoFollow

3) Use the Posts, Categories, or Authors tabs to manage robots directives