Controlling Indexing with Robot Instructions 

Overview

SureRank controls search engine indexing at two levels: global defaults for entire post types, taxonomies, and archive pages, and a per-post or per-term override for individual items. Understanding which one wins resolves most “why isn’t this page indexed” tickets.

Global Settings

SureRank → Settings → Advanced → Robot Instructions

This screen has three tabs: Indexing, Following, and Archiving.

Inside each tab, you toggle the setting on or off separately for Post Types (Posts, Pages, Products, etc.), Taxonomies (Categories, Tags, etc.), and Archive types (Author archives, Date archives, Search results, etc.).

By default, SureRank sets NoIndex on post format archives, attachment pages, author archives, date archives, and search results pages, since these tend to create thin or duplicate content. Nothing is NoFollow or NoArchive by default out of the box.

Per-Item Override

On any individual post, page, or term, open the SureRank panel → Advanced tab. You’ll find No Index, No Follow, and No Archive, each with three choices:

• Default: inherit whatever the global Robot Instructions setting says for that post type
• Yes: force it on for this one item, regardless of the global setting
• No: force it off for this one item, regardless of the global setting

Which One Wins?

The per-item setting wins when it’s set to Yes or No, but only as a set. If you leave all three (No Index, No Follow, No Archive) on “Default” for an item, it inherits the global Robot Instructions settings for that post type as expected.

However, if you set even one of the three to Yes or No, the other two stop inheriting the global setting for that item. They’re treated as off, even if still shown as “Default.” So if you override one setting on a post, set the other two explicitly as well rather than leaving them on “Default.”

The Number One Override to Check First

Settings → Reading → “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is a core WordPress setting. If it’s checked, WordPress and SureRank force noindex and nofollow across the entire site, overriding every other setting, whether global or per-item.

Steps for the Customer: “Why Isn’t This Page Indexing?”

1. Check Settings → Reading. Confirm “Discourage search engines” is unchecked.
2. Open the specific post, then go to the SureRank panel → Advanced tab. Confirm No Index is set to “No” or “Default,” not “Yes.”
3. If it’s on “Default,” check Settings → Advanced → Robot Instructions → Indexing tab to see if that post type is globally set to NoIndex.
4. Save the post, then request re-indexing via Google Search Console if the change is urgent.

Troubleshooting

All settings look correct, but Google still hasn’t indexed the page

This is a crawling or Search Console issue, not a SureRank output issue. See the Search Console troubleshooting runbook.

The robots meta tag isn’t appearing in the page source at all 

Rule out a caching plugin serving a stale version of the page before escalating to engineering.