Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?
-
I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site.
The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with?
In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type?
Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.
-
Hi all,
I think it is first important to look at your category structure. Use categories as main categories and tags as subcategories. If you have 1 post, in 5 different main categories, you will then be duplicated in some cases the same info. I keep all my posts in one main category which I do index and then all the subcategories as (tags) which I have no-index on. Also, Yoast SEO is my favorite plugin. Just plain easy to use.
-
with hindsight I should have redesigned the blog pages to convert. The potential spend of the lost traffic was not harnessed
-
Wow, I'm chiming in almost three years later, but I think my question is pertinent. When you stopped indexing your category pages...did sales "happen" on your main website? I ask because you wrote that sales don't happen on your blog. I'm just wondering why sales are not happening on your blog and if it's a matter of funneling or the lack thereof?
-
my blog category pages began to rank higher for key converting search terms than my main website - not good - sales dont happen on my blog.
So I stopped the indexing of my category pages....guess what happened?..my website is back to position 1 BUT my blog traffic reduced by half.....so consider EGOL's warning prior to making a decision
-
Most of the search engine traffic that enters my blog comes in through category pages. It would be a huge mistake for me to block them. However, depending upon the topic area of your site the category pages might have a different importance.
-
Thank you very much for your answer.
I do have the all in one plugin installed, and my excerpts are not originally written, but taken from the articles so i will leave it no index.
Thanks again!
-
Hey Kevin,
Welcome to SEOmoz!
Since you are running a Wordpress set-up I would recommend downloading the All-in-one SEO plug-in. It's one of the most popular plugins for Wordpress installs because it helps you with your SEO configuration. Chances are you've probably already got this installed but I figured I would mention it in any case.
As to the no-index configuration of your category and archive pages; I would definitely recommend no-index on the archive pages because otherwise you run the risk of duplicate content, plus you don't really want those archive pages ranking for any of the keywords you are targeting.
For the category pages; if you are giving each post a unique excerpt and thus making the category pages unique in their own right, I would probably take the no-index tag off if only to aid link juice flow between categories and individual posts. If on the other hand you are not writing a unique excerpt for each post and instead showing the whole post or a modified version of the original, you run the risk of duplicating your content and this will greatly impact your ability to rank for the terms you are trying to target. In this case, keep the setup as it is.
Hope these points help.
Best,
Anthony
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
-
Schema Markup for eCommerce Category Pages?
My research indicates that applying an ItemList schema markup to our category pages is likely the best way to go. However, I've also ready that Google discourages schema markup on category pages. I'm just wondering if any of you have applied schema markup to your category pages and, if so, how did you do it? John,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnBrown75
Essay Writer1 -
Too many links per page? Double navigation on every page...
I have a client with navigation across the top of each page plus the same nav links in a sidebar on every page. Can that duplication (or the sheer number of links) on each page have a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | brm20170 -
Product Page Links
I have a product category page at https://www.hurtlegear.com.au/s1000rr/ which currently has 38 products on it. Problem is, all the product titles start with the name of the text: "bmw s1000rr" (because that's what they are) - so that means there are 38 anchored internal links on that page, all starting with the same keyword. You can see how that might look to the Google crawler. Recently that page dropped from around 15 to outside the top 100, and Moz tells me that the page is keyword stuffed with "bmw s1000rr" (no suprise) so I'm guessing that may be the reason the page has disappeared out of the SERPs. I don't really want to change all the product titles (then they wouldn't make sense) so I'm just wondering if there is any way around this? Is there some way of telling Google that this is a product category page and therefore to ignore the anchor text in all of those product links? Can/should the links have some kind of markup on them? Or is the page beyond help? Basically I'm looking at a way of keeping the product titles as they are, but avoiding a page penalty from Google somehow. I'm a bit of a newbie, any suggestions would be most appreciated. Cheers, Graeme
On-Page Optimization | | graeme720 -
Optimizing a product category vs. a bespoke content page
Hi there, I work for a furniture retailer in the UK and I have a question about ranking for search phrases. Say I'm looking to rank for the keyword phrases: 'Tempur mattress' and 'Tempur mattress liverpool' and I have a category at: www.mysite.co.uk/tempur/ which list all of our mattresses, would I be better trying to optimize this page for those key phrases or would I be better generating a new page, say, www.mysite.co.uk/tempur-mattress-liverpool.html Thank you for your input.
On-Page Optimization | | Bee1590 -
What to do about pages I have deleted?
I have been working through the dead links on my page and recreating the page with new content for those pages that it still makes sense to have on the site. But I have a few that were just changes of the title, spelling mistakes or other ways of saying the same thing In other words I created a page called "areas of the UK we cover" but decided to change it to "areas covered" However, I must have created links to this page and now it is a dead link with a page authority of 19 I think it would be spammy to have two pages, one called "areas covered" and the other called "areas of the UK we cover. It's not a disallow in Robots.txt because the page does not exist Please note I do not have access to the header to add code for a 301 redirect. I'm still using webs.com but not for new sites. I also have a page called singing telegrams london, that I changed from singagrams london. These are two words for the same thing but they are two very different keywords would it be ok to recreate this page and create content for singagrams london. Help is much appreciated
On-Page Optimization | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
Ranked page is not desired page
I have a question on a problem I am currently faced with. There is a certain keyword that my employer wants to rank for. The good news is that sometimes it does rank in the top 5 pages of Google. (It drops in and out) The bad news is that it is going to a page that we need to keep, but not the ideal place we want people who are looking for that keyword to go to. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with this type of situation and what tactic they used to get people to the better page.
On-Page Optimization | | trumpfinc1 -
Archive of content
Hi there, I have recently joined a company to look after the e-marketing side of things, anyway the company I work for have been writing articles for a website that they own for over 2 years, probably about 200 or so unique articles on that website, however over the past year or so there has been no contribution to this site and was wondering if it would be worthwhile transferring these article over to our blog?, as this is where all the attention is in terms of marketing etc Kind Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | Paul780