I am using a wordpress blog and my site is showing links to tags, to categories such as page 2, to author, and archives. Do I do this through the Robotstxt? or do I add this in the source through a meta tag command? How do I noindex this so these pages don't get picked up in search over my content article? Do I have to use a plug in? the only one I could find is Yoast SEO, I added the plug in but it seems like the page titles being indexed from the tag, author, categories are still there.
Using a plugin is always easier, but first you can try managing robots.txt and htaccess files yourself.
in yoast seo then in titles & meta then in taxonomies there is meta robots option you can select noindex
the best way is to indicate all the duplicate categories in the robots.txt so that SE robots don't even index these pages
Use Google XML Sitemaps ( www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/ ), you can find an options to noindex for tags, category, etc. hope this help.
google spiders are very stubborn for indexing everything. you know, robots.txt is not an effective solution. be sure that, - remove any unwanted URLs from googgle webmaster tools panel. (sometimes you must try this 2-3 times) - manually check your plugin settings (check plugin functions.php or etc.) for possible bug. - if you are using tag cloud, you have to check your theme files manually i think. because sometimes, the tags which are locate just below the posts/cats noindexing but the tags on homepage (tagcloud) are still indexing. even you restrict them via robots.txt.