Control indexed content on Wordpress hosted blog...

[ShawnW]

I have a client with a blog setup on their domain (example: blog.clientwebsite.com) and even though it loads at that subdomain it's actually a Wordpress-hosted blog. If I attempt to add a plugin like Yoast SEO, I get the attached error message. Their technical team says this is a brick wall for them and they don't want to change how the blog is hosted.

So my question is... on a subdomain blog like this... if I can't control what is in the sitemap with a plugin and can't manually add a sitemap because the content is being pulled from a Wordpress-hosted install, what can I do to control what is in the index?

I can't add an SEO plugin...

I can't add a custom sitemap...

I can't add a robots.txt file...

The blog is setup with domain mapping so the content isn't actually there. What can I do to avoid tags, categories, author pages, archive pages and other useless content ending up in the search engines?

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[effectdigital]

That almost looks like... your client doesn't have WordPress actually installed on their sub-domain at all. It looks like they set up a 'something.wordpress.com' site, which WordPress actually hosts - and somehow overlayed their own sub-domain over it (using DNS / name-server shenanigans)

If that is true then, since WordPress hosts the blog, there's not much you can do. If it is a local WordPress install that does exist on your client's actual website instead of being 'framed' in (or something shady like that) - then I haven't seen this error before and it seems really odd. It smacks of someone trying to cut corners with their hosting environment, trying to 'be clever' instead of shelling out for a proper WP install. Clearly there are limitations...

Ok, there's only one other alternative really. This is also technical though and I don't know if it wold be any easier for your dev guys but...

You can send no-index directives to Google without altering the site / web-page coding, as long as you are willing to play around with the (server-level) HTTP headers

There's something called X-Robots which might be useful to you. You need to read this post here (from Google). You need to start reading from (Ctrl+F for): "Using the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header"

As far as I know, most meta-robots indexation tag directives, can also be fired through the HTTP header using X-robots

It's kinda crazy but, it might be your only option