How to turn off Archive indexing in WordPress

[J.dylan]

I am having a bit problem with a new WordPress website. I am not able to figure out why this is happening. The website is based on sports tips. So it has around 6 categories, 5 pages and some 20 tags in it. I search in Google and found that there are lots of archived indexed in it. I want to stop archive, tags and categories to be coming up in the search results. It looks like that there are is so many content, while there is very less. I want some help here to remove this thing. Is there any bad effects of this which can cause problem in future with WordPress indexing.

[Steyn]

Well you can fall into issue if the content on your website keeps on increasing. Here when it comes to archive or tags or categorizes then this are kind of duplicate content generator. If you are having thousands articles on your site then in a similar way this pages are replicated and becomes more higher in number. This is not a good thing and in Google Webmaster you can face penalty. So here you have to start with turning those thing off and this can be well managed through robot.txt. You can simply disallow this page urls in the same and done. Slowly Google will remove the pages from the search result.

[Jacques25]

If you are using WordPress SEO tool then it might help you in cleaning this stuff. Just instal this and click on Titles and Meta. There you can find a section as others. Click on that and you can just add no index to the pages and archives. Then save it. This tool will create a robot.txt file and this will on its own manage the site issues. Just try to learn a bit more about the settings. There is a full documentation available which will put enough highlight on the settings. And I am quiet sure that this is going to work well and you wont face any issues.

[Vandam]

Do not just modify the robot.txt file just like that. Try to learn as much possible. Because there can be serious problem if you do that. Robot.txt is a crucial file and if you add a no index to the categories and tags then there are chances that your pages might not get indexed well.It is best to take help from some expert. There are various online forums which will give you detailed highlight on your problem. And through that you can resolve the issues you are facing. The plugin is going to add too many things which you don't really need.

[Ronchi]

You can try removing the urls if you want through Google Webmaster tools. There you can find the list of things you want. All you have to do is login to the webmaster tool. And from the left you can find options as remove url. Just click on that. And then choose Remove directory. That will surely wipe out things that you don't need and will clean you site. It will take sometime to finalize your site settings. I am quiet sure that it might start working if you do that well. This might be a manual process but it is a kind of permanent thing which will surely help you in cleaning the search page of your site.

[Shreevats]

This is not a short term process. It is going to take time and will give you a little bit of problem also. Like if you make changes in the site search page then Google might take time to re-crawl your site and remove things from its index. And this can take weeks or months. Depending on your site crawling state. Here sometime ti happens that you wont be getting a clear way of cleaning your site. So the only thing left here is to rely on the WordPress SEO. This will surely help you in fixing the issue. Just go through some articles on the same.