Tweet
Your SEO plugin is probably blocking your author pages from Google and you don't know it
Not sure how common this is but it caught me off guard the first time.
If you're running Yoast, Rank Math, or most other SEO plugins and you've never explicitly gone into the archive settings, your author pages are almost certainly set to noindex by default.
The plugins do this intentionally. Author archives can create thin, near-duplicate content, and historically that's been a real SEO problem. But if you've put actual effort into building author profiles, that default is quietly working against you.
The fix is straightforward — flip the setting, clear the cache, resubmit the sitemap, request indexing via URL Inspection. Takes ten minutes.
The bigger issue is that many people then discover Google still won't index the page, even after removing the noindex tag. That's usually a content quality problem. A generic two-sentence bio isn't enough. Google wants to see credentials, a real bio, external links, ideally some schema markup.
Worth checking if you run a multi-author site and care about E-E-A-T signals.
Full breakdown here: https://www.submitshop.com/author-pages-not-indexed
Not sure how common this is but it caught me off guard the first time.
If you're running Yoast, Rank Math, or most other SEO plugins and you've never explicitly gone into the archive settings, your author pages are almost certainly set to noindex by default.
The plugins do this intentionally. Author archives can create thin, near-duplicate content, and historically that's been a real SEO problem. But if you've put actual effort into building author profiles, that default is quietly working against you.
The fix is straightforward — flip the setting, clear the cache, resubmit the sitemap, request indexing via URL Inspection. Takes ten minutes.
The bigger issue is that many people then discover Google still won't index the page, even after removing the noindex tag. That's usually a content quality problem. A generic two-sentence bio isn't enough. Google wants to see credentials, a real bio, external links, ideally some schema markup.
Worth checking if you run a multi-author site and care about E-E-A-T signals.
Full breakdown here: https://www.submitshop.com/author-pages-not-indexed