Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Yoast SEO Plugin: To Index or Not to index Categories?
-
Taking a poll out there......In most cases would you want to index or NOT index your category pages using the Yoast SEO plugin?
-
Thanks Dave!
Here are my settings:
Categories - noindex, follow
Tags - noindex, follow
Format - noindex, follow
Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives
Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives
Media - noindex, follow
-
HI Irving,
The Yoast default doesn't have anything checked making everything indexable and their tutorials don't do a very good job at helping people set it up correctly.
It's interesting to know all the differing opinions on what you should have indexed or not indexed.
Here are the settings I have:
Categories - noindex, follow
Tags - noindex, follow
Format - noindex, follow
Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives
Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives
Media - noindex, follow
-
Noindex is the way to go for category pages. I also don't let G index tags and archives.
-
yes noindex,follow category and tag pages. It's the Yoast default setting i believe.

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
-
I need help in doing Local SEO
Hey guys I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to SEO world and I want to do local SEO for one of my clients. The issue is I do not know how to do Local SEO at all or where to even start. I would appreciate it if anyone could help me or give me an article or a course to learn how to do it. Main question The thing that I want to do is that, I want my website to show up in top 3 google map results for different locations(which there is one actual location). For example I want to show up for
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seopack.org.ofici3
online clothing store in new york
online clothing store in los angeles or... Let's assume that we can ship our product to every other cities. So I hope I could deliver what I mean. I'd appreciate it if you could answer me with practical solutions.0 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Moving html site to wordpress and 301 redirect from index.htm to index.php or just www.example.com
I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
Page Authority 40
Linking Root Domains 31
External Link Count 138
Internal Link Count 18
Status Code 200
1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
Page Authority 19
Linking Root Domains 1
External Link Count 0
Internal Link Count 15
Status Code 200
1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
or
Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks0 -
Do I need to put the company name in the SEO Title box in Yoast?
I am optimizing Title Tags for a WP site. I am getting ready to add keywords to the Yoast SEO. I noticed the long company name is currently the Title Tag - I choose 2-3 keyword phases per page- what do I do with the long business name? In my own site I can post up 70 characters of keywords in the Title box and my company name appears after a pipe in the browser with my the keywords ahead of it? As Follow on my Site: Title, Tilte, Title - Company Name. Thank you! Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph.Lusso1 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0