For one post or page, open the WP Visibility sidebar in the editor, expand Indexing, and set Search engine indexing to Noindex. For every entry of a post type, or every archive of a taxonomy, tick it under WP Visibility → Settings → Indexing. The page then sends noindex, follow, prints no canonical, and leaves the sitemap and llms.txt. It still loads for anyone who has the link.
One post or page
Three places set the same value:
- The WP Visibility sidebar, Indexing panel, Search engine indexing: Default, Index or Noindex. Link following beside it offers Default, Follow or Nofollow.
- The document settings panel, where a Search visibility panel offers one toggle, Hide from search engines. It sets Noindex and nothing else.
- The classic editor, in the WP Visibility metabox, Search engine indexing with the same three options.
Default means inherit the site rules below. Index is an explicit override: a post set to Index stays indexable even if its whole post type is noindexed. The pre-publish panel warns when a post is about to publish with Noindex on; it does not block publishing.
A category or tag
Edit the term under Posts → Categories or Tags. WP Visibility adds Search engine indexing to the edit form with the same three options. It applies to that term’s archive page, not to the posts in it.
A whole post type or taxonomy
WP Visibility → Settings, Indexing section:
- Noindex these post types: every entry of a ticked type is kept out of search and out of the sitemap. Nothing is ticked by default.
- Noindex these taxonomy archives: the archive pages of a ticked taxonomy. Post formats are ticked by default.
Archives and search results
The same section holds four switches. Internal search results (on by default) and date archives (on) are noindexed out of the box; author archives (off) and paginated archive pages from page 2 onward (off) are indexable until you tick them. The 404 page is always noindex.
What the page sends
WP Visibility adds its directives to WordPress’s own robots meta tag. A noindexed page sends exactly noindex, follow, or noindex, nofollow when nofollow is set too, and prints no canonical link. An indexable page sends the snippet, image and video preview limits from the Indexing section.
The site-wide switch beats everything. When Settings → Reading is set to discourage search engines, WordPress prints noindex on every page and WP Visibility does not argue, so a per-post Index cannot make a staging site indexable.
What the sitemap does
- A noindexed post or page is left out of the sitemap, and a noindexed type or taxonomy has no sitemap file at all. A post set to Index stays in.
- Sitemap files are cached for up to a week. Saving the post clears the cache. If you set noindex another way, through WP-CLI, an import or an assistant ability, run
wp visibility flushor save any post so the sitemap is rebuilt on its next request. - A noindexed page also leaves the llms.txt page list, and the optional IndexNow module does not announce it.
What noindex does not do
- It does not remove the page from results at once. The engine has to recrawl the page and read the tag; how long that takes is up to the engine.
- It does not stop people opening the page. For that, set a password or make it private in WordPress.
- Do not also block the URL in robots.txt. A blocked URL cannot be recrawled, so the engine never sees the noindex and may keep the old listing.
- It does not redirect. If the page has moved, redirect it instead.
From the command line
wp visibility set 123 --noindex=1
wp visibility set 123 --noindex=0
wp visibility set 123 --noindex=-1
wp visibility settings set noindex_author_archives true
wp visibility settings set noindexed_post_types '["testimonial"]'1 is noindex, 0 inherits the site rules, -1 forces index.