Hi guys, I just open a new discourse community…of course we wanna be index on Google and it’s friends, but we’re gonna open a category that we don’t want to show with any search bot. So the simple question is How to add “nofollow” to an entire category? Cheers.

Ah. I don’t think there is a facility to add noindex to posts in a category, and you certainly couldn’t add it to parts of the topic list without tanking the ranking of your entire site. You’d have to write a plug-in that adds the meta directive to the crawler layout, I don’t think there’s much hope for adding it with JavaScript.

Change the permissions to require being logged in.

Links already have nofollow added to them. If staff users want to post nofollow links, you can make an tag instead of the other methods of making links.

Oh. I totally missed the question. I thought he wanted the category not to be indexed. Right. All links have nofollow for TL2 and below.

Right. I just want an entire category and all its posts not to be indexed. I don’t care about the links. I’m talking about the post.

If you want the posts to be publicly available, but denied in robots.txt, you need a plugin. I sort of wrote one. If you’ve got a budget or I find the time, I’ll make it available.

[image] pfaffman: denied in robots.txt, Two problems with that: Noindex breaks if you deny the page in robots.txt (can’t load the page to see the noindex), and that would make the list extremely large.

He wants the posts in the category not to be indexed, so denying the category is, I think, what he means.

Exactly. The things is that I’m trying to connect WP with Discourse with the plugin and manage the comments of my blog posts with Discourse. But I don’t want Google indexing the entry on Discourse because it would be a duplicate of the Wordpress entry, thinking on SEO of course. So I think the proper way to do this is creating a Category, like ‘Feedback’, on Discourse and adding a nofollow by default to all entries on it.

Oh. That. See https://experts.feverbee.com/t/is-it-possible-for-the-feverbee-blog-posts-to-be-pulled-in-full/6192/7 . I see. I’m not an SEO person. I think that adding the no follow for the category to robots.txt will do what you want.

How to add noindex to an entire category?

Product Support

pacoesni (Francisco Espinoza) September 23, 2017, 3:39pm 3

Not so bad. But what if I just want to hide it from the search bots?

Topic		Replies	Views
How to noindex topics within a specific category? Product Support	10	452	December 31, 2025
Is it possible to specify noindex for all topics in a specified category? Product Support	6	351	February 4, 2025
Need to find a solution to block indexing topics from a category Product Support	2	178	November 27, 2024
Plugin to add “noindex” to categories and the posts within those categories Plugin	0	83	July 22, 2026
Plugin para incluir noindex en categorías y los topics de esas categorías Feature	1	129	July 16, 2026

How to add noindex to an entire category?

Related topics