Google indexing pages and categories, should I noindex?

paraztos said:

I personally noindex cat and tag pages, but most ppl say it doesn't matter. I guess they provide some internal link juice if you keep them in the index. Once your site starts to pick up google will prioritize content pages over tag/cat pages.

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jennykumar said:

I too noindex category and tag pages.
Rather I manually create pillar pages like category, and index it which links to my top 25 posts (on single page) within that category.
There's no use of indexing page1, page2 - such pages under categories and tags. waste of crawl budget of your site.
Rather save budget to index new articles.

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Scorpion Ghost said:

@BlogPro

So I google my site to check if google deindexed those pages.

I see the pages are still indexed, for example - site.com/page/7/

I check the page in Webmasters, it says:

URL is not on Google
This page is not in the index, but not because of an error. See the details below to learn why it wasn't indexed.

I check details:

Last crawl Aug 12, 2022, 4:06:11 PM
Crawled as Googlebot smartphone
Crawl allowed? Yes
Page fetch Successful
Indexing allowed? No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag

But the page is still in the serps.

Then I thought maybe the problem is that I'm googling while logged in with that Google account. So maybe it's showing it to me, but not to the world. So I open Chrome where I'm logged into a different Google account, and the page is still there. I try Brave and Opera, the page is still there. Then I thought maybe the IP address, so I use a US proxy with a Firefox browser and not logged into Google, and the page is still fucking there

It's one of three things:

1) Google just crawled the page yesterday and saw the 'noindex' tag, and it needs a few days to deindex the page
2) The "noindex" tag will tell a search engine not to index a page, but it won't make it remove an already indexed page from the serps
3) Google is just fucking with me

So what is it? What now?


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EDIT

I'm thinking it's 1, because for example this one is not in the serps - site.com/page/6/

Everything the same, only:

Last crawl Aug 4, 2022, 2:59:04 PM

And this one is not there - site.com/page/3

Last crawl Aug 11, 2022, 9:48:07 PM

But this one IS THERE - site.com/page/5

Last crawl Jul 25, 2022, 11:03:14 AM

And this one IS there - site.com/page/10

Last crawl Jul 25, 2022, 5:54:54 PM

And this one IS there - site.com/page/15 (yeah no shit, this page doesn't exist on the site, leads to PAGE NOT FOUND)

Last crawl May 20, 2022, 3:00:26 AM

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Okay now I'll wait to see about this one - site.com/page/7/

Google says it crawled it yesterday. It says it's not in the serps, but it is! Okay, I understand, you need a few hours to remove it from the serps, because technology has not advanced to the point where you can do it instantly after BEING FUCKING TOLD TO!!!

And I'll use the removal tool for this one because, the page doesn't exist, your crawlers can't get to a page that doesn't exist, you idiot google - site.com/page/15

So we wait. We'll see what happens...

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