Index or Noindex Wordpress Categories?
-
I've read a few different opinions on this, but I'm still unclear as to the best practice. I use my categories more like tags. Let's say I write a post about about seo, local marketing, and indexing. I would use the categories "seo"+"marketing"+"indexing". Therefore, that same post will show up in all three category pages. If these category pages are all set to be indexed, what impact does that have on my post being indexed? Should I noindex all of the categories except for the main ones to avoid too much duplicate content? Or do you recommend noindexing all of the categories? I know some seo plugins make this easy to do (I'm using Yoast).
The only reason I'm hesitant to noindex all categories is because some of them rank well for their subject. I also already tried noindexing about a month ago and lost a lot of blog traffic, so I reversed it. Now some of my category pages have overtaken my post rankings, which makes it harder for the reader to find the content, but my overall blog traffic is back up.
With my situation, what is the best thing to do long term? I just started using my blog a lot more so I want to know that I have it setup correctly. Thanks in advance!
-
Correct! I show a teaser preview from the actual content on the homepage. The excerpt I write as a brief summary of what the article is about. Best of luck!
-
Well I've been wanting to redesign my main blog page anyways - make it slightly different from the category and archive pages, so if it'll help I'll do it.
Just to clarify, how does your blog homepage differ from the category pages? No excerpts on the homepage?
-
You don't have to do what I did. I have websites that don't do this, and they are just fine.
I'm not sure what your current setup is, but if it's not a lot of work for you, it's definitely worthwhile to do my method. It won't make or break you, but it'll help for sure.
-
Thanks for your quick response. So are you saying I should only have the excerpts on category pages? Right now I have them on the main blog page and category pages. On your main blog do you just have title links/pictures?
And I'm glad to finally hear that category pages should remain indexed from someone.
-
I've never understood the argument that category pages should be noindexed. They have always been an excellent source of traffic for me, too.
It's said that it could be considered low quality content. If you treat your category pages as just another page in your website (a healthy category introduction/description does wonders) it can be a nexus for broad search terms.
As an example of where this works very well, I have one category in a computer networking blog I have about TCP/IP. It's part of a series that explains the protocol, and the category page essentially is the 'guide' page, linking to each step in the guide to learning TCP/IP. I have the excerpts used only in category pages, so each category page also has unique preview content for each post.
Your specific worry is that you have posts in multiple categories. The thing is, there won't be the same posts in every category page so there will be a mashup of content. Some duplicate content is not bad. In addition to the category description, you'll be fine so long as you don't have synonymous categories.
You're fine in keeping them indexed. I would think you are crazy if you did otherwise
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
-
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Should I remove these pages from the Google index?
Hi there, Please have a look at the following URL http://www.elefant-tours.com/index.php?callback=imagerotator&gid=65&483. It's a "sitemap" generated by a Wordpress plug-in called NextGen gallery and it maps all the images that have been added to the site through this plugin, which is quite a lot in this case. I can see that these "sitemap" pages have been indexed by Google and I'm wondering whether I should remove these or not? In my opinion these are pages that a search engine would never would want to serve as a search result and pages that a visitor never would want to see. Attracting any traffic through Google images is irrelevant in this case. What is your advice? Block it or leave it indexed or something else?
Technical SEO | | Robbern0 -
Pages not being indexed
Hi Moz community! We have a client for whom some of their pages are not ranking at all, although they do seem to be indexed by Google. They are in the real estate sector and this is an example of one: http://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/102-iveagh-gardens-crumlin-dublin-12/2289087 In the example above if you search for "102 iveagh gardens crumlin" on Google then they do not rank for that exact URL above - it's a similar one. And this page has been live for quite some time. Anyone got any thoughts on what might be at play here? Kind regards. Gavin
Technical SEO | | IrishTimes0 -
No existing pages in Google index
I have a real estate portal. I have a few categories - for example: flats, houses etc. Url of category looks like that: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1 Each category has about 30-40 pages - BUT in Google index I found url like: mydomain.com/flats/?page=1350 Can you explain it? This url contains just headline etc - but no content! (it´s just generated page by PHP) How is it possible, that Google can find and index these pages? (on the web, there are no backlinks on these pages) thanks
Technical SEO | | visibilitysk0 -
Wordpress initial setup
Hello I am going to create a new WP site. Basically, I would like to have your suggestions for the initial setup (checklist) in terms of SEO. For example: xml sitemap, robots.txt, .htaccess, permalinks, www or no www, etc Basically, I would like to start in the right way Any advise would be appreciate. Thank you so much Andy
Technical SEO | | newsmile0 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
301 forward of index to root
Hi, In my crawl diagnotics, I received an error for duplicate content: 1. www.website.com 2. www.website.com/ 3. www.website.com/index.html Which code do I have to add to my htaccess to avoid this?
Technical SEO | | wellnesswooz0