Categories and tags
Overview
Categories, tags, and other public taxonomies get two SEO fields on their Edit screen. Use them when an archive should stay out of search results, or when it duplicates another URL.
Where to find these settings
- In the WordPress admin, open a taxonomy (for example Posts → Categories)
- Edit an existing term
- Find SEO Visibility and Canonical URL
These fields appear only on the edit screen, not on the “Add new” form.
Fields
- Stop search engines from indexing this category? — asks search engines to leave that archive out of their results, and leaves it out of the sitemap
- Canonical URL — leave empty to use the term’s own archive URL. Fill it in only when this archive is a duplicate of another page. The archive then drops out of the sitemap
Empty archives
A category, tag or other archive with nothing published in it is kept out of search results on its own, with no setting to change: it only says "nothing found". It's also left out of the sitemap. Once you publish something in it, it's listed again. A parent category whose posts are all in its subcategories counts as having posts, since its archive shows them.
Titles and descriptions
The edit screen does not include a title or description field. If a term already has those values (for example after a Yoast migration), Dirigible SEO will use them. Otherwise the title is the term name plus the site name, and the description falls back to the WordPress term description. With neither, no description is printed and search engines pick their own snippet.
Tips
- Noindex thin or overlapping archives (a tag with one post, duplicate brand taxonomies) instead of deleting them. Empty ones are already handled.
- Do not set a canonical unless you are pointing visitors and crawlers at a better URL.
