Guiding the user through the pages that make sweden phone number up your WordPress site is only half the job. The other half is properly guiding the bots that crawl it.
To guide bots, tags are used at the page and website level. Two of the most used tags are noindex and canonical. A question that closely concerns them arose some time ago and to which John Mueller tried to respond .
The question has come up again very recently and concerns the coexistence of these two tags on the same pages. In the first answer, given several years ago, mister Google was rather vague.
On the occasion of the question that was asked to him through reddit, he took a slightly more precise position, which allows us to build additional tools to decide when to use the noindex tag and when to use the canonical tag.
A few days ago, a user of the Reddit subforum dedicated to SEO asked John Mueller directly if what he had said publicly in the 2021 video regarding the use of the noindex and canonical tags together was still valid .
On that occasion Mueller had used the word “ maybe ”: he had clarified that if both tags are present , the noindex to tell bots that the content should not be indexed and the canonical to direct them elsewhere, it could help Google better understand where to direct user searches. Many times in fact there are no black or white answers and we move in a gray area.
The same noindex tag is sometimes happily ignored. The tag is used to prevent some pages that still make up the ecosystem of a WordPress site from ending up in the results because they are not actually relevant but perhaps are service pages.
Another situation where sometimes you try to use the noindex tag is with duplicate content . In this case, however, it would be better to use the canonical tag instead , indicating for all possible duplicates what the link is to the canonicalized resource.