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.
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
-
Hi there.
I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article )
Thanks
Martin
-
I agree with everyone above. I use tags for internal search which it is fantastic for, but I don't use it for SEO purposes
-
Yes. Absolutely correct. You should never index tag pages. These may be targeted but are of low quality with not much quality content. Moreover, they may have more keyword density than what you should have for a page to rank.
-
noindex,follow is common for these pages. You want Google to be able to navigate their way around the links and pages, but letting tag pages in create lots of additional and unnecessary pages into the index. You never find these pages ranking in Google even when they are open.
Choose a good, logical category structure, promote your blog posts and the pages will all be found.
-Andy
-
Thanks for the reply
On their own page: https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
[excerpt]On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all.
There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway.
My thinking around this is that if people are looking for "Articles on topicx" then this would be more relevant to their search query because it's a collection of exactly what they are looking for - and more geared towards the 'long tail"
-
I have to agree with you Andy. Avoiding the hassle of having duplicate content issues makes it worth no-indexing.
-
Always noindex these where you can Martin as it avoids lots of duplicate pages being created. Yoast makes this nice and easy
-Andy
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
-
Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags
Hi, Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is. The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible. Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0
