🔍 What Is Happening?
If your WordPress Posts page (commonly /blog/) is showing a noindex, nofollow robots meta tag in the browser source even though every Yoast SEO setting and per-page setting is explicitly set to index, the cause is almost always OTTO's deployed robots meta tag.
OTTO can inject its own robots meta tag directly onto your pages as part of a deployment. This tag is written at the platform level and takes precedence over WordPress and Yoast settings. No amount of adjusting Yoast or your theme will remove it — the override must be resolved inside Search Atlas.
⚠️ Why This Happens
When you run an OTTO deployment that includes a robots meta directive, OTTO pushes that instruction to your connected WordPress site. This is intentional behaviour — it allows OTTO to manage crawlability at scale. However, it can create a conflict if:
- An earlier OTTO deployment set the Posts page to noindex, nofollow and the setting was never reversed.
- A bulk robots meta deployment targeted archive or listing pages and included your Posts page unintentionally.
- You updated Yoast after the OTTO deployment, so Yoast now says index but OTTO's previously deployed tag still takes precedence on the live page.
In all these cases, your page will remain noindex until you explicitly update or remove the OTTO-deployed tag.
🛠️ How to Check the OTTO-Deployed Robots Tag
- Log in to Search Atlas and open the relevant project.
- Navigate to OTTO SEO → All Sites (SEO Automation) for that project.
- Review any deployed actions related to robots meta, noindex, or crawlability settings.
- Identify whether a noindex, nofollow directive was deployed to your Posts page URL (e.g. /blog/).
✅ How to Fix the Conflict
- Inside Search Atlas, locate the OTTO-deployed robots meta action affecting your Posts page.
- Update the robots directive for that page to index, follow, or remove the deployed tag entirely if you prefer Yoast to manage it going forward.
- Re-deploy the updated action so OTTO pushes the corrected tag to your WordPress site.
- Once deployed, view the page source in your browser (Ctrl + U or Cmd + U) and confirm the robots meta tag now reads index, follow.
- Clear any WordPress, server-side, or CDN cache so search engines receive the updated tag immediately.
After these steps, Yoast and OTTO will be in agreement and your Posts page will be crawlable and indexable again.
🔎 How to Verify the Fix Is Live
- Browser source check: Search the page source for
robotsand confirm the meta tag reads index, follow. - Cache cleared: Ensure all caching layers have been purged so the updated tag is served to crawlers.
If you have reviewed OTTO's deployed actions and cannot identify the source of the noindex tag, or if the tag persists after re-deploying, please reach out to our support team via the chat icon in Search Atlas so we can investigate further.