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When do i search query on Google like this:
site:example.com (WordPress blog)
It gives the paginated URLs also in the SERPs like this:
https://www.example.com/page/2/https://www.example.com/page/3/What's the best way to avoid this? I have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. Can it be done from there?
In older versions of Yoast SEO plugin, you could indeed choose the option to exclude paginated pages from being indexed in search engines, using the noindex robots directive:
However, they recently removed that option because Google said that pages set to noindex in the long term will be treated as though they were set to noindex, nofollow. Meaning that links that only appear on paginated pages may no longer be getting the internal links they should be, which can have an adverse effect on onsite SEO.
You can read more about that here: https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/
If you would still like remove the paginated pages from the search results, you will need to add, or find a plugin in that will add the following code within the pages <head> </head> section :
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
