Noindex Controls gives you a simple settings page to exclude low-value, thin-content page types from search engines. Search result pages, tag archives, author archives, date archives and deep pagination rarely deserve to rank and can spread your crawl budget thin. Tick the ones you want excluded and the plugin adds a noindex,follow robots tag to exactly those pages — nothing else.
Features
Installation
- Download noindex-controls.php below.
- Upload to wp-content/plugins/, or zip and upload via Plugins → Add New.
- Activate the plugin.
- Go to Settings → Noindex Controls and choose which page types to exclude.
What’s inside
This plugin is open source under the GPL. Here is the start of the file — download it for the complete, ready-to-use plugin.
<?php
/**
* Plugin Name: Noindex Controls by ConvertAtlas
* Plugin URI: https://convertatlas.org/en/wordpress/noindex-controls
* Description: Settings to noindex search results, tag archives, author archives and date archives — common thin-content pages that can dilute your SEO.
* Version: 1.0.0
* Requires at least: 5.5
* Requires PHP: 7.4
* Author: ConvertAtlas
* Author URI: https://convertatlas.org
* License: GPL-2.0-or-later
* Text Domain: ca-noindex
*
* Built with convertatlas.org — free developer tools & templates.
*/
if (!defined('ABSPATH')) { exit; }
final class CA_Noindex_Controls {
const OPTION = 'ca_noindex_options';
public static function init() {
$self = new self();
add_action('admin_menu', array($self, 'menu'));
add_action('admin_init', array($self, 'register'));
add_action('wp_head', array($self, 'output'), 1);
}
private function defaults() {
return array(
'search' => 1,
'tag' => 0,
'author' => 1,
'date' => 1,
'paged' => 0,
);
}
private function opts() {
$o = get_option(self::OPTION, array());
return wp_parse_args(is_array($o) ? $o : array(), $this->defaults());
/* … download the file for the full source … */Frequently asked questions
Why noindex tag and archive pages?
These pages often contain little unique content and can compete with or dilute your real content in search. Excluding them focuses crawling and ranking on pages that matter.
Does noindex,follow lose link value?
Using follow means search engines can still follow links on the page, so internal link equity continues to flow even though the page itself is not indexed.
Will this remove pages already in Google?
Adding noindex signals Google to drop them over time as it recrawls. It is not instant; you can speed it up by requesting reprocessing in Search Console.
Is it safe to noindex search results?
Yes — internal search result pages are a classic thin-content source and Google generally recommends keeping them out of the index.