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Why aren’t my empty categories indexed? — Contents

  • How to fix it
  • How to overwrite it

Why aren’t my empty categories indexed?

Published on November 18, 2018
Revised on February 15, 2026

TSF automatically adds a noindex robots meta directive to empty categories in WordPress. This tells search engines not to index the category page.

A category with no posts has no meaningful content. WordPress may return a 404 for it, but not always. Either way, indexing an empty page hurts your site’s SEO — search engines see it as thin content.

TSF handles this by setting noindex on any category that has zero published posts assigned to it.

How do I fix it?

Assign posts to the category. Once a category has at least one published post, TSF removes the automatic noindex directive.

How do I overwrite it?

If you want the category indexed even while it’s empty, you can override the indexing state via the category’s visibility settings. Edit the category in your WordPress admin and look for TSF’s indexing option under the visibility settings.

This may cause issues since WordPress may return a 404 for the category.

Screenshot of <span class=nowrap translate=no>The SEO Framework</span>'s visibility settings for a WordPress category showing the indexing override option
Overriding the indexing state for a category.
Filed Under: Troubleshooting, Robots

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