Washington Post has a noindex meta tag in a story about abused women journalists which prevents search engines from displaying in search results.

Taylor Lorenz via Mastodon:

Seeking help! No matter how many keywords/names u search related to this story the article doesn’t appear on Google

This was a front page A1 story I wrote for WaPo on how smear campaigns and abuse women journalists endure are a press freedom issue. Can someone explain why the article does not appear on Google? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/02/14/women-journalists-global-violence/

SEO is in my wheelhouse so I figured I’d take a closer look. It turns out, this specific article has a meta tag that tells search engines not to index it.

I took a look at two other Washington Post articles at random, one from today and one from 2023 (the same year the article in question was published). Neither of those articles contained the noindex tag.