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.
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
-
Hi there,
Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs?
The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term.
Just curious what others think.
Thanks!
-
Noindex tags and your author page (if you only have 1 author)
For categories, leave it alone, just add a bit of unique content there, much like how ecommerce sites do it.
-
Thanks everyone so much for your fast and helpful feedback!
-
Hi there! In addition to the responses above, I'd also recommend checking out the Yoast plugin. On a brand new blog, I recommend noindexing the category pages until a good amount of content is built up in each category, including unique content on each category landing page. You may find this post by Dan Shure helpful: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success. Best of luck!
Christy
-
I believe this depends from case to case. On my own blog I have disabled tags but not categories and this is because I believe few category URL are very much user friendly.
Before you actually implement anything, ask yourself if this will hurt user experience or not and If the answer is no then just go ahead and do that!
Hope this helps!
-
I would, personally I have disabled my tag page and author page since there are no tags, and only one author. As for the categories I have them no-indexed.
-
Yes, actually John Muller at Google said this is a wise thing to do.
First ask yourself is there really any benefit in your users going to any of those pages?
Duplicate content is not a major issue and can be wildly ignored but many blogs go over the top with tags etc.. Making Google's life harder when trying to make a decision on what content to show for results.
I personally went as far as removing the front end of wordpress completely and coded a very quick and simple version of the front end myself, so it still gets managed using the wordpress interface like a content management system.
Works a treat and the response from Google SERPS was great. Also reduces the amount of pages Google needs to crawl over and over to look for changes. This will see Google returning more frequently to the key pages looking for updates.
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
-
If I change Tags and Categories in Wordpress blog post, will it negatively affect SEO and cause 404s?
Hi, I have belatedly come to the conclusion that I have been using tags and categories when blogging in wordpress incorrectly. The result is that Google seems to prefer to show my archives and tags in search results rather than the post itself. Not good UX. As the site is only a few months old, am I best to learn my lesson and tag and categorize correctly moving forward or Should I go back in to these posts and clean them up & categorize and tag correctly. If I do this, will it cause 404s and hurt my SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | johnyfiveisalive2 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
I am currently working on a small site with approx 50 web pages. In the crawl error section in WMT Google has highlighted over 10,000 page not found errors for pages that have nothing to do with my site. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Should i index or noindex a contact page
Im wondering if i should noindex the contact page im doing SEO for a website just wondering if by noindexing the contact page would it help SEO or hurt SEO for that website
Technical SEO | | aronwp0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Blog post summary pages
I'm wondering post-panda if its wise to block access to blog post summary pages like this one: http://www.howtotradestocks.org/blog/page/15/ Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | PeterM220