Ghost CMS: indexing tips for posts, tags, and authors
Ghost generates a page for every post, tag, and author, so the indexing play is to push your real content — posts and valuable tag pages — through the Indexing API while keeping thin archives and duplicate paginated pages out with noindex. Get the assets in, keep the noise out, and confirm status with URL Inspection.
Ghost is great for indie publishers, but its default URL structure generates a lot of pages: every post, every tag, every author, every paginated archive. Half of them are SEO assets, half are noise. The indexing strategy needs to match.
What to push
- Every new post on publish — free quota covers this comfortably.
- Major topic tag pages that you've written substantial content into.
- Your /authors pages if they have real bios and link to substantial bodies of work.
What to noindex (don't push, exclude from sitemap)
- Empty or single-post tag pages.
- Paginated archive pages past page 2 (low value).
- Search results pages.
- Author pages with no bio and no real content.
Ghost lets you set robots meta per-template. Add noindex to thin templates BEFORE pushing post URLs — otherwise Google may take a long time to drop them.
Post-publish workflow
- Publish in Ghost.
- Grab the canonical URL (yoursite.com/post-slug).
- Push through IndexerNow.
- Audit the post — Ghost defaults are good but custom themes sometimes break canonical or OG tags.
Sign in with Google, paste your URLs, ship them through Google's Indexing API. Free daily quota, $9.99 for a 50-URL pack.
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