Should we "no-follow" archives or categories?
-
I'm reading some reports from my first crawl of 10K pages and I'm wondering if it's wise to mark the archives "no-follow."
I have a WP tool that provides a tool that offers the no follow for categories or archives recommending to choose either one or the other but not both.
What would be the best solution?
-
Just use an SEO plugin and canonicalize allt he archives and categories, don't use no-follow as it is a will suck away your pagerank. If you must you could also use the metaname robots and set it to follow, noindex
btw I think Pashmina should win an award for cutest SEO on seomoz
-
One problem with Wordpress Themes, and not all of them by any means, but they are set up for blogrolls or they list your pages/categories/archives (in my case all three).
With all the posts I have it seems dangerous to change themes at this point as the site may become non-recognizable or I may very well break what isn't necessarily broke.
As far as indexing goes I'm over 90-percent indexed, not bad when you consider the nature of the blog with block quotes that are not original content when added to enrich to full meaning of something I'm blogging about.
Another problem with these designs is you may show any number of posts per pages and Moz is crawling individual posts, pages with multiple posts and actually multiplying the number of posts reflecting duplicate content falsely. I'm also getting "too many links" notices because of the design. But I digress.
In my plugin I simply clicked archives and doubt it will make too much difference. Let's see if anyone else has some input.
Thanks Pashmina
-
You'll probably get some different opinions on this. Your site link architecture and the design of your archive/search/category needs to be assessed to figure out the best solution.
If I had to pick one or the other for the nofollow attribution, I'd pick the Archives over Categories because they have less keyword value. Generally, I'd say no need to use it. Sure, you might say that those pages don't have much value since all they contain is a repetition of content on your other pages. And some may try to use the "nofollow" tag as a way to prevent any link juice from flowing to those pages. But PageRank sculpting using this tactic isn't really effective.
It would be more effective for your SEO to redesign your blog/website sidebar/footer links so that you have "less" links pointing to your Archives and/or categories.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
"index.htm" for all url's in google analytics
I don't have this issue with other wordpress websites, only this one website, and I don't know what's causing the issue: Google Analytics is adding an "index.htm" to every single page on the website. So it is tracking the pages, I see no errors - is it tracking the right page? When I click on the page link in a report, I naturally go to a "404 page not found" since the website address isn't "www.example.com/rewards/index.htm" - but instead the actual address would be:
Reporting & Analytics | | cceebar
"www.example.com/rewards/". I have navigated to View Settings in GA to insure "default page" is empty. Although adding anything else to this field does not effect the page url in analytics reports either. Could it be htaccess file - or a plugin effecting the htaccess file?_Cindy0 -
Need help with my "ghost" blog...
...when I fired my original web designer, did they sabotage coding? I have never checked my Alexa/Google Analytics, or any blog ranking until last night. Subsequently, I have spent the last 24 hours googling away, and finally joining MOZ b/c I'm desperate to find out WHY I'm not ranking. I've googled and found many answers to a problem directly opposite of mine: (How to increase traffic with a high ranking), but I already have quite a bit of traffic (via Wordpress Stats), but can not be found on any ranking system. So, fiddled with some NoFollow/NoIndex boxes in Genesis SEO settings thinking maybe when my domain name changed it messed everything up? Most the boxes HAD been checked, so I unchecked them all. Anyhow, basically signed up for the monthly service so i could ask this question on the forum. My site is hellowhitney.com **it's so weird---i have a LOT of organic direct hits coming directly to my blog (for instance a celebrity re-posted a post which gained a lot of traffic from Twitter to the page), but Google nor another ranking is seeing it. IN FACT, it stops any and all ranking data back to FEBRUARY 2016 when I changed my domain name from Myscriptedreality.com to HelloWhitney.com Ignorance is NOT bliss in this case--would appreciate any help! #ForeverGrateful
Reporting & Analytics | | hellowhitney0 -
What's the new "Value" column in GWT about?
I was checking out our GWT this morning and noticed a new column on the far right that was labeled "Value". Currently, there isn't anything of value (no pun intended) listed just $Nan. Anyone else see this or know what it might be? 014pThY
Reporting & Analytics | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Google Making all searches secure - "Not provided" data to increase in Analytics
A lot of you might already be aware of the recent Google change at encrypting all search activity except for clicks on ads. Rand did a whiteboard session on this recently. How is everyone planning to adjust their research data to accommodate for this change?
Reporting & Analytics | | SEO5Team0 -
Google Webmaster says "0" pages indexed
Built my first Wordpress site. It launched a few months ago. Google has crawled 76 pages so far. But why are 0 indexed?
Reporting & Analytics | | cschwartzel0 -
Figuring Out the Source of "direct traffic" by looking at landing page parameters
I have a client who runs an e-commerce website, and I noticed that 40% of his traffic and 25% of his sales are all attributable to Direct Traffic. At first, I tried to solve this problem by tagging all of the previously untagged links in his e-newsletter, which I expect to be very helpful. However, then I looked at the landing pages for his direct traffic, and I see that it is almost entirely filled with thousands of unique URLs that begin with a question mark followed by the name of his e-newsletter or shopping cart vendor. It would be the equivalent of having a url like the following: "www.willmarlow.com/?constantcontact=keya;sldkfjsdlfkjdf;sldkjf" If we have this amount of information in the link, shouldn't there be a way to add additional parameters to the URL to move this traffic out of the Direct column? Has anyone encountered this before? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
Has anyone experienced Google Analytics track the page visit to a "thank you" page, but not the goal conversion?
Has anyone experienced where Google Analytics would track the page visit to a "thank you" page, but not the goal conversion that should result? The goal had worked for a long time as it is as just a goal url with head match. No funnel. Not case sensitive. For about four days now, no conversions have been recorded, but Google Analytics shows hundreds of people visited the page that should trigger the goal. Additionally, we have received the hundreds of leads. A Screaming Frog search shows the code is embedded throughout the site. For the interested, the GA code looks like (and the 8 Xs are the correct number on the site): Am I missing something?
Reporting & Analytics | | 352inc0 -
Creating a Filter in GA to track Parent Category
I don't know if the title makes sense, but here's my question... Our newspaper website has multiple categories like World, Sport, Entertainment etc. Now, a story, belonging to the entertainment section maybe published on the entertainment page but is likely to have a slot somewhere on the Home page as well as other pages. The same goes for stories in sport etc. However, the url displays the date folllowed by the post title and thats it, no category name. Now, a user may end up going to a detailed story that belongs to the entertainment section (from the home page or any other page) without actually having visited the entertainment page. However, for tracking purposes, we want to see how many hits we got on the entertainment page and any story belonging to that particular section. So, my question is how do I go about creating filters that can help me track category page and detail story hits as one? Or, should I ammend the url structure (keep in mind we are using wordpress for our news website) to include category after the date and would this solve my problem of tracking? I asked a similar question recently but maybe I did not explain myself clearly. Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh590