What do dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoFollow and dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoIndex exactly do?

[jaychang99]

Hi everyone 🙂

I have been a big fan of next-seo and thank you for all the maintainers and @garmeeh for this wonderful library.

I recently ran into an issue when using dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoFollow and dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoIndex .

Yes, I do know that in readme, we must use these two props carefully (hence the prefix dangerously), since as the name implies, it sets 'all' of the pages to not be followed, nor indexed.

environment info

• "next-seo": "4.28.1",
• "next": "13.3.1",
• "react": "18.2.0",
• local dev environment: MacOS 12.5 running nodeJS v.16.19.1

I was using this props in my <DefaultSeo/> in my _app.tsx and my code pretty much looks like this:

// _app.tsx

import { DefaultSeo } from 'next-seo';
import { useRouter } from 'next/router';
import { AppMainLayout } from 'app.layout/AppMainLayout';

const App = ({ Component, pageProps }) => {
  const router = useRouter();

  const contactUsPage = router.pathname === '/contact-us';
  const aboutPage = router.pathname === '/about';

  if (contactUsPage || aboutPage)
    return (
      <>
        <DefaultSeo
          dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoFollow={true}
          dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoIndex={true}
        />
      <Component {...pageProps} />
      </>
    );

  return (
    <AppMainLayout>
      <DefaultSeo
        dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoFollow={false}
        dangerouslySetAllPagesToNoIndex={false}
      />
      <Component {...pageProps} />
    </AppMainLayout>
  );
};

App.getInitialProps = async ({ Component, ctx }) => {
  // logic
};

export default App;

The code snippet above shows that I don't want my page to be indexed when the pathnames are /contact-us and /about.

So I expected my page to only be not indexed and followed on pages /contact-us, and /about. (And in all the other pages except for these two have to be indexed)

However, after deploying this code to my production server, my google search console warned me that it wasn't able to index the whole website (not these 2 specific pages) because of the noindex property.

I was puzzled because the only two pages that should not be indexed are /contact-us and /about. (These to pages were not listed on Disallowed list in robots.txt, FYI)

How could this be? if the if statement was working correctly? Am I missing something out? Thanks.