Hello.
I have a few general/seo questions as someone using Rankmath on Wordpress:
Are tags set to noindex by default? If not, where can I change this?
RankMath automatically submits any new published post to a few search engines (Bing/Yandex) automatically- is this something Ghost can do?
Is there a 404 monitor anywhere?
Is there a sitemap? I’m not seeing one if I add /sitemap.xml to my domain (which is on ghost.io at the moment.)
4 - Ghost autogenerates sitemap.xml, unless your site is in private mode. DO NOT set canonical URLs for posts, unless you want Ghost to omit them from the sitemap. (It’s a quirk.)
2- you could set up an integration, but it isn’t something Ghost does natively
3- There are a number of broken links scanners out there that can scan a site. You don’t need something Ghost-specific to do this. (Yeah, it’s very possible that WP has a tool that does this. WP is “everything and the kitchen sink”.)
2 - Ghost notifies pingomatic when posts are published
1 - From my look, tags are shown in your sitemap.xml, under sitemap-tags.xml. The robots.txt that Ghost generates doesn’t appear to say “don’t index tags”, and I don’t see any HTML noindex tags on the individual pages on my site. So I would assume they aren’t set to noindex by default.
You could probably include a meta noindex tag through your Ghost theme, I haven’t though too much about though. There is a specific tag.hbs file for tag pages.
It could be more easier to instead copy your sites existing robots.txt that Ghost generates, and then add a disallow rule for all of your tag pages. More information on a custom robots.txt file in Ghost is available: Modifying robots.txt
Thank you everyone! Very helpful responses and love the community vibe.
I do see a tags.hbs file but I’m not sure what the right code is to add for noindex. Would appreciate some help from anyone good with this.
I have over a hundred tags so it will be difficult to add each in robots.txt file
Actually, I think you want default.hbs here.
{{#is "tag"}}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
{{/is}}
Put that 
up in the head section for default.hbs. After loading the modified theme, be sure to check that you see this on tag pages, but NOT on posts, pages, home, etc.
Thanks- would this go into the head or body section?
(and now some extra characters so that my reply is long enough.
So, I have a self-hosted Ghost blog here that’s been running for a couple of months now. None of my posts even seem to be appearing in Google. I can Google for several words that should work and the posts literally doesn’t show up in any of the pages of results. Here are two examples using the site name and the full title of recent posts.
Ghost claims it handles SEO, but it doesn’t appear to be doing so. Is there anything I should check for or enable? I was wondering why some of my posts even on topical issues were getting no views and it seems to be because they can’t be found organically. I know stuff isn’t going to appear at the top of Google or anything, but they don’t appear to be there at all, even when narrowly searching for them. I must be missing something here.
Have you checked and connected Google Search Console? So far Google has indexed two of your pages (see here). It might either take some more tome, its a technical problem or Google just does not consider your content relevant. If you want that your posts rank you need a keyword strategy and obviously content worth being ranked for specific keywords.:)
Clicking your link gives me 0 search results. 
But also…I never came across anything about the Search Console when setting up my site. Ghost just said it “handles SEO”. Well, this certainly explains a lot! I just connected my site to it and it’s presently analyzing it. Much appreciated!
This is a hobby blog that’s not monetized so I don’t care about hyper SEO or anything, I’d just like to actually show up in search results.
Cheers!
Search for the following term: site:geekbravado.com
It will show you all pages indexed by / from Google. You should also find them in your search console.
SEO ist a pretty complex topic. At it core its about quality content and keywords. And lots of technical stuff which is pretty much handled by Ghost.
Search Console is not required to be indexed, just a tool to give you some transparency. It should reveal if and when your site was craled and if there are technical reasons preventing indexation.
If you want your posts to be indexed, you also need to understand the prerequisites that make relevant content worth being indexed. At its core Google is a question answer machine. If your content does no contribute any meaningful perspective (check the EEAT criteria) it wont be indexed.
Buying a pretty good running shoe (aka Ghost) doesn’t make you a top runner (aka appearing in Google Search). There is a lot of practice and stuff in between (aka writing quality content). Consider the Search Console a Smart Watch helping you to keep track on your progress.
Are there specific blocks in Ghost that direct Google about this Q&A mechanism? Such as toggles? Or is a simple H3 question followed by a paragraph answer sufficient?
As far as I know Ghost does not have a dedicated Q&A block / card. so H2/H3 with the question and answer is the paragraph should be good enough.
However this wont fix the issue. Its not about adding some Q&A into your text. What perspective are you contributing in your posts?
If you write about stuff that no one searches anyway, why should google index? You can not quickly hack around your way into Google. It s along term commitment that requires effort and strategy.
Same as with running. Bumping some nice stickers on our shorts or shoes will not do anything good with regard to your performance.
I totally get it that it’s not the solution to SEO problems. But, using your shoe analogy, a better shoe designed for running will help the runner, instead of a shoe made for, say, golfing.
Yes and Ghost is a very good shoe.:)
This totally needs to be decontextualized and put on t-shirts.
The only two things showing up there are the home page and a link to one very old post that I wrote two blog platforms ago.
I did sign up for Google Search Console and went through its onboarding, including submitting all my Ghost-generated site maps. I also asked it to manually index several recent posts to get it started off. It crawled the pages, but said they’re still not indexed because they’re not referenced by any sitemaps. Except they are, I checked. I know it can take Search Console several days to do the initial automated analysis of your site, but it also seems to be giving me conflicting information here.
Here’s an example of what it’s showing for one of the posts I asked it to manually index:
Meanwhile, here’s the sitemap for posts from my site, which I have successfully imported into GSC:
The sitemap I imported to GSC also shows that there’s over 30 successfully indexed items on it, but the “See Page Indexing” option in the Sitemaps screen is also greyed out. It’s very strange. Maybe I just have to wait a few more days and I’ll keep watching it to see if that’s the case. But given the conflicting results when I submit manual index requests, I wonder if it’s not getting something it expects from my Ghost site.
So, the plot thickens further. Google finally completed its “day or two” initial analysis after like four days and it’s report is not making a lot of sense to me.
It’s say that 12 of the pages on the site are blocked by robots.txt. Except they aren’t. This is the content of my robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://geekbravado.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /ghost/
Disallow: /email/
Disallow: /members/api/comments/counts/
Disallow: /r/
Disallow: /webmentions/receive/
As far as I know, this is a pretty bog standard configuration. Beyond that, there are 25 pages stuck in the “Crawled - Not Indexed” status, which keeps saying they don’t reference sitemaps that they do. I don’t know if this is just Google being confused or if Ghost is sending it wrong information.