I’ve published a website under the custom domain name with Frontity (on Vercel).
The website is regularly calling the WordPress API that is under the .admin subdomain.
Inside of the WordPress Admin, I disabled an option for Google to index my site (meaning, I don’t want Google to index my WordPress site, because it is just an API for the Frontity app).
Now, is this a good idea? Is my frontity website (that is just published) going to be properly indexed by Google? I have a Yoast plugin inside of WordPress that is throwing a warning:
Huge SEO Issue: You’re blocking access to robots. If you want search engines to show this site in their results, you must go to your Reading Settings and uncheck the box for Search Engine Visibility. I don’t want this site to show in the search results.
Is this going to affect my Frontity installation in a way that is not going to be indexed properly?
I want WordPress installation not to be indexed, and I want Frontity app to be indexed. Currently, there’s noindex meta tag in my frontity app because I disabled admin to be indexed which causing my frontity app not to be visible by the google search engine
Edit:
I’ve managed to remove noindex tag from my frontity app by deactivating REST API - Head Tags which kinda was overriding the Yoast settings. However, my admin page is indexed and on 2nd page of google but my Frontity app isnt.
How can I hide my admin panel from indexing, and index only the frontity??
If you don’t want your WordPress site to be indexed then what you’ve done is the correct thing, i.e. uncheck the box for Search Engine Visibility in the WordPress settings.
Another thing that could be worth doing is creating a minimal WordPress theme that doesn’t render any content at all - e.g. just a styles.css with the required header info and an index.php. The index.php file could simply have a wp_die() statement displaying a “nothing to see here” kind of message.
Alternative a theme designed for headless WordPress such as Nude may fulfil your needs.
Either way, the idea is that if no content is displayed then the search engines have nothing to index.
If you have a recent version of Yoast, namely > v14, then you should use @frontity/yoast package in your Frontity site.
Should I modify the “Main Index Template (index.php)” file from Appearance → Theme Editor? This is going to kill my theme pages only? Is there anything that could go wrong with this approach since I am editing this on production env so just to check first
<?php
/**
* The main template file
*
* This is the most generic template file in a WordPress theme
* and one of the two required files for a theme (the other being style.css).
* It is used to display a page when nothing more specific matches a query.
* E.g., it puts together the home page when no home.php file exists.
*
* @link https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/basics/template-hierarchy/
*
* @package WordPress
* @subpackage Twenty_Twenty_One
* @since Twenty Twenty-One 1.0
*/
get_header();
if ( have_posts() ) {
// Load posts loop.
while ( have_posts() ) {
the_post();
get_template_part( 'template-parts/content/content', get_theme_mod( 'display_excerpt_or_full_post', 'excerpt' ) );
}
// Previous/next page navigation.
twenty_twenty_one_the_posts_navigation();
} else {
// If no content, include the "No posts found" template.
get_template_part( 'template-parts/content/content-none' );
}
get_footer();
