Best way to implement noindex tags on archived blogs

[TheCarnage]

Hi,

I have approximately 100 old blogs that I believe are of interest to web browsers that I'd potentially like to noindex due to the fact that they may be viewed poorly by Google, but I'd like to keep on our website.

A lot of the content in the blogs is similar to one another (as we blog about the same topics quite often), which is why I believe it may be in our interests to noindex older blogs that we have newer content for on more recent blogs.

Firstly does that sound like a good idea?

Secondly, can I use Google Tag Manager to implement noindex tags on specific blog pages? It's a hassle to get the webmaster to add in the code, and I've found no mention of whether you can implement such tags on Tag Manager on the usual SEO blogs. Or is there a better way to implement noindex tags en masse?

Thanks!

[TomRayner]

Hi there

I definitely admire your creativity on this one, but unfortunately the Google Tag Manager loads tags asynchronously.  That means that the tags are added for users who execute javascript on page loads, but it means that the copy of the page that is crawled does not contain the tags.  All of this means that the Google crawler won't see a noindex tag on the crawled version of its page if it's loaded via the Google Tag Manager.

I think your reasoning for noindexing the pages themselves is a very good one.  You're removing pages with thin or potentially duplicate content from Google's indexing, which is healthy, while keeping the content on the page for the user, which again is a healthy thing to do.  I can definitely see the reasoning.

Unfortunately, the only way I can see the tags being implemented is manually by the webmaster.  If the site runs wordpress, you can change the robots meta data very quickly in the Yoast SEO plugin.  If you get to the page in question and scroll to the Yoast plugin section, you'll be able to select the noindex tag from a drop-down menu, meaning it can take as little as 30 seconds.

Hope this helps and good luck with the implementation.