I don’t really wanna use an SEO plugin and I don’t wanna pay for the premium version of one either.
However, I really want to keep some features usually in them.
If you want to rank all the content on my website, you probably shouldn’t worry about telling robot what to index and if links in a post should be followed or not.
In case you want to write some posts for your audience but not for search engines, you should probably care about a way to set up the meta robots tags.
If you don’t wanna get back together with your ex-seo plugin, you should probably use a mu-plugin for that and advanced custom field to take care of your robot meta settings.
Table of Contents
Meta Robots Settings with Advanced Custom Fields
I am going to assume that you know what custom fields are.
You can create custom fields without a plugin but I really like using Advanced Custom Fields to take care of that for me.
I created a field called “robots_meta_settings” to store four values:
- robots_meta_option_01 : Index and Follow
- robots_meta_option_02 : No Index
- robots_meta_option_03 : No Follow
- robots_meta_option_04 : No Index and No Follow
This is the explanation for each one of the options:
- One in case you want search engines to index the post and follow the links in it
- The second one in case you don’t want to index a page but you don’t have a problem with search engine following the links in it
- The third one in case, you want Google to index the page but not follow the links
- The fourth one in case, you don’t want the page to be indexed and the links to be followed.
These are the fields that you will find on your post settings page usually found
Do I think that all of the options are necessary?
There might be cases when you need one or the other, I just what SEO plugins were doing and provided the options despite not needing an option now.
First part has been solved now
Meta Robots Settings with a Mu-Plugin
The second part has to do with creating a simple plugin to handle that.
I use mu-plugins to avoid using a code snippet plugin.
I am not coder, I know the basics of what you can do with computer programs, so I am sure there are better and simpler ways to handle this.
This is the mu-plugin that will robots meta tags to the head section of your pages source code:
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Robots Meta Settings
Plugin URI: https://ticolibre.com
Description: Add Robots Meta Settings
Version: 1.0
Author: TicoLibre
Author URI: https://ticolibre.com
*/
// Filter to Remove Robots Meta Settings generated by WordPress
remove_filter( 'wp_robots', 'wp_robots_max_image_preview_large' );
// Add Robots Meta Setting to Head
function custom_robots_meta_tags() {
// Check if it's a singular post or page
if (is_singular()) {
// Get the custom field value
$robots_meta_option = get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'robots_meta_settings', true);
// Check if the custom field value exists and is not empty
if (!empty($robots_meta_option)) {
// Based on the value of the custom field, generate the appropriate meta tag
switch ($robots_meta_option) {
case 'robots_meta_option_01':
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1\" />\n";
break;
case 'robots_meta_option_02':
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1\" />\n";
break;
case 'robots_meta_option_03':
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"nofollow,max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1\" />\n";
break;
case 'robots_meta_option_04':
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex,nofollow,max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1\" />\n";
break;
default:
// Default meta tag if the custom field value is not recognized
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1\" />\n";
break;
}
} else {
// Default meta tag if the custom field value is empty or not set
echo "<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"max-snippet:-1,max-image-preview:large,max-video-preview:-1\" />\n";
}
}
}
// Hook into wp_head to insert the meta tags with priority 1
add_action('wp_head', 'custom_robots_meta_tags', 1);
The first filter will remove the original Robots Meta Settings added by WordPress
The second section check the custom field called “robots_meta_settings”, check the values in it and based on that, it adds the directives you specified.
In case, no value is stored yet in the custom field, it will add the first option which is to index the page and follow the links in it.
Why Those Directives or Tags?
I wasn’t trying to invent the wheel here.
The directives or tags were taken from the SEO Framework plugin
SEOPress Directives or Meta Tags
The SEOPress plugin have different ones:
For option number #1
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="index, nofollow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">
<meta name="bingbot" content="index, nofollow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">
For option number #2
<meta name="robots" content="follow, noindex">
For option number #3
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta name="googlebot" content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">
<meta name="bingbot" content="index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1">
For option number #4
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
SEOPress is doing more than the SEO Framework but I am not really sure I don’t really know it makes a difference.
