Category pages - SEO or deindex?
-
What is the best thing to do with category pages? Should I deindex them or use SEO on them? I use the Thesis theme and the Wordpress SEO plugin. I am just not sure what to do with category pages.
Also will they create duplicate content?
-
Just to follow up on this - I am ranking # 5 for a category page and it's a competitive keyword. So I am not sure deindexing category pages is the best idea and I am glad I didn't do it with my second and new blog.
-
I've also been wondering about this recently but I've made similar observations on a much smaller scale and it makes sense.
What about only displaying the excerpts on the category page, and use your unique (maybe?) meta descriptions as the excerpt?
-
I don't get any traffic to my category pages but of course my site is new so I am just getting a couple organic hits per day.
But my category pages do just give an excerpt. More than a sentence or two though. I already deindexed them. I guess I can revisit that later.
-
My category pages just organize all my blog posts. Nothing new.
-
I just remembered that Thesis and Wordpress SEO sometimes conflict. I made some adjustments and added some code to alleviate some of these conflicts but perhaps the deindexing of category pages was overrode by Thesis.
I just clicked on noindex category pages in Thesis. I also clicked on noarchive to category pages in Thesis.
Will that do it?
-
I am using YOAST SEO so that is good. So I don't have to do anything to get them deindexed?
If Wordpress SEO (by Yoast) deindexes my category pages, why are they showing up in my sitelinks? I tried to demote the category pages but they keep showing up. Thanks!
-
I have a blog with 150 category pages and they pull in kickass traffic. Lots of those pages bring in over 1000 visitors per month.
If you have long blog posts and display the first sentence or two on the category page that will not be duplicate content. It is no different than a category page for an ecommerce store. Category pages get out there and compete for serious traffic terms.
Lots of people say don't index them. That's not what I have found and if I noindexed them I would be walking away from a lot of income and more traffic than is received by the rest of the blog combined.
-
In every case i've seen they should be deindexed. Install YOAST SEO plugin and it will deindex them by default. It's a great plugin too.
-
Your category pages should be no-indexed if they don't have rich unique content per category. It is hard to say without seeing the category pages if it will provide duplicate content, but in most cases it will. You should also no index your archive area as well because that will definitely provide duplicate content.
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
-
On page links
Hi I am really intrigued by Bloomberg strategy. if you look at their article pages they are full with internal links done with what I assume to be an automated process (too many pages to be done manually). it seems to work for them. I would love to hear your opinions.
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-26/uber-said-close-to-raising-funding-at-up-to-40b-value.html0 -
Home page and category page target same keyword
Hi there, Several of our websites have a common problem - our main target keyword for the homepage is also the name of a product category we have within the website. There are seemingly two solutions to this problem, both of which not ideal: Do not target the keyword with the homepage. However, the homepage has the most authority and is our best shot at getting ranked for the main keyword. Reword and "de-optimise" the category page, so it doesn't target the keyword. This doesn't work well from UX point of view as the category needs to describe what it is and enable visitors to navigate to it. Anybody else gone through a similar conundrum? How did you end up going about it? Thanks Julian
On-Page Optimization | | tprg0 -
Optimizing web page
Hi I have implemented most of the suggestions, which are offered threw SEOMOZ on our web site www.zaposlitev.net. But rankings are not improving. Could anyone help please? Thanks Tomaz
On-Page Optimization | | tomaz770 -
Source page leading to a 404 pages in reports
Hi everybody, I wonder how to find and quickly correct 404 errors in my crawl reports : SeoMoz says me "http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead" is 404, but I can't figure out a source page where a link to that url appears. I tried a google link:http://domain.com/this-page-is-dead request, with no more luck. I imagine the trick is trivial, but I need it 🙂 Moreover, why do not show a list of pages referring to this 404 page on reports ? Thanks, Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0 -
Adding dynamic item to static page - good for SEO?
We have a static page we want to rank for a competitive phrase. Would it help, or would it make little to no difference, if we added a small dynamic item to the page so that each time the googlebot visited the page it wouldn't be 100% the same as the last time it visited? The reason to do this would be because of the belief that Google likes pages that update once in a while. The dynamic portion of the page wouldn't be as simple as a page counter, but it wouldn't be very elaborate either. A tiny portion of the page. Think of something like current temperature or current CPU utilization (it won't be that, but it will be a small updating number that is not incrementing like current time or a page counter). Would that make any difference at all? (I know there will be responses that I should add real updating data to the page to make it dynamic; let's take that one off the table for right now --trying to see if there's something I can do that is simpler for now). Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0 -
Duplicate Page Titles?
I'm running a campaign report within SEOmoz & am getting 9 pages that appear on this report. They all happen to be our author pages www.example.com//author/admin We have multiple authors. Is there a proper way that I should take care of this? Also as a side note, I'm using Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, is there a setting on their I should change that will fix this issue? Or is it an issue at all? Thanks, BJ
On-Page Optimization | | seointern0 -
Too many on-page links
I manualy counted the links on my website http://www.commensus.com which came to around 50, but SEO moz says I have over 100 and google isn't seeing them all.
On-Page Optimization | | jawl44630 -
Does keyword density on a landing page effect SEO?
I'm relitavely new to SEO, and I just wondered how keyword dense the homepage to our businesses site should be? Is there any value in loading the frontpage at the potential expense of readibility, or should our content elsewhere be responsible for our yield in search engine results? Look forward to any responses. Thanks, Mark
On-Page Optimization | | RobertHill0