Google shows every page of my WordPress site but I only want the home page indexed

Question

So to start with, I have Google crawl my (WordPress) website with the search console, now I can see my pages in the search engine. But it shows every page separately. Like my /contact, /services and /about. I really want only to show my homepage. I searched for plugins like all-in-one SEO then I stepped over to Yoast for the automatic sitemap and robots.txt. I also entered disallow for those pages from being crawled in my robots.txt. I have set 'Noindex' to all those pages. That also doesn't work.

I have selected private for my pages to see if this changes anything... doesn't work.

Today I have discovered that I also have unwanted URL's that come from nowhere, like: /category/uncategorized, /author/admin and /2016/03...

And for some reason I have for every page that Google shows me the same meta description.

I really want that Google doesn't show these pages, it's really annoying. What can I do?

Answer 1

I have them disallowed in my robots.txt... but it doesn't change anything, Google still show them, also on those pages contact, services,... I use Noindex from Yoast. Still no result. So what can I do else? Or maybe I do something wrong

If you specifically don't want these pages indexed then you should use the noindex robots meta tag in the head section of the page (or X-Robots-Tag HTTP response header).

DO NOT disallow them in robots.txt. A disallow rule in robots.txt does not necessarily prevent indexing, it prevents that page from being crawled by Googlebot. If the page is linked to it can still appear in Google's index. But in this case, it already is indexed.

It will take some time for Google to update its index before these pages are dropped from the SERPs. You can speed up the process by using the URL removal tool in Google Search Console. However, that does seem a bit drastic for these presumably quite innocent pages.

Although why you would want to do this is debatable. (Particularly for pages like /services - isn't that a primary, content rich page?) Isn't it dependent on what you are searching for that determines whether you see these pages? (Or are you doing a site: search?) The fact that you don't see these pages for companies you search for may simply be that the other pages rank higher for the phrase you are searching for. If I search for about google, I find Google's "About" page, but otherwise it's a page that doesn't ordinarily get returned in the SERPs.