Google Search Console Coverage Error Fix for Hexo Blog

Introduction

In Google Search Console, I have been observing lots of “Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’” coverage errors for my Hexo blog website for a long period of time.

Recently, I realized that the submitted URLs are the ones that I submitted via sitemap, and the sitemap contains the URLs to pages that has <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> which explicitly tells the search engine crawler not to index the page.

This kind of error, in my opinion, should not be confusing to the search engine. I have submitted the same sitemap to Microsoft Bing but it did not throw me error on this. Anyhow, seeing these errors is annoying, let’s fix them.

Google Search Console Coverage Error Fix for Hexo Blog

Having noindex for the web pages that you don’t want the search to crawl is important. So we will not touch it. What we could do is to remove those web pages from the sitemap. In fact, the web pages that have noindex are not important at all.

My Hexo blog website has been using hexo-generator-sitemap to generate the sitemap. But I did not study how to configure the generation previously.

It turns out that the all the noindex errors come from the tags and the categories web pages, and hexo-generator-sitemap already allows the user to disable them in the sitemap.

We could add the following code in the Hexo blog website _config.yml file and we are done.

# https://github.com/hexojs/hexo-generator-sitemap
sitemap:
  # path:
  #   - sitemap.xml
  #   - sitemap.txt
  # template: ./sitemap_template.xml
  # template_txt: ./sitemap_template.txt
  # rel: false
  tags: false
  categories: false

After resubmitting the new sitemap to Google Search Console and clicking “run validation”, we will see that the related errors have gone after a few days once the validation is complete.