This question was asked in the Wordpress forum here. Since nobody had answered Michael at press time, I thought it might be helpful to find the answer and publish it here.
Solution:
Option 1) Use robots.txt to prohibit search engines form indexing a page. Simply add this to your robots.txt file. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, simply create one in your go-to text editor.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/page-title
These two lines will a) let search engines know this rule applies to all robots and b) tell them they cannot index the page located at “category/page-title”.
Option 2) Use this handy plugin. The Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Plugin by Jonathan Kemp. With this plugin you can choose pages that the plugin will identifying as non-indexable in the robots.txt file. There are many other options with this plugin including adding the rel=”nofollow” tag to various places in your Wordpress code.
Option 3) Use a meta tag to order search engines to not index a particular page. The meta tag looks like this:
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
Johnny from Aquamarine Engagement Rings
Doesn’t the All-in-One SEO plugin do this? In the settings for the plugin, you can check a box to noindex category pages. You can also noindex tag pages, too.
Simon
Yes it does…we talk about this in the latest post…but not everyone likes using plugins, this this is another way to achieve the same thing. Cheers.