Should I noindex our WordPress Categories?
-
What are the conditions under which we should noindex blog categories?
I'm asking because I want to decided whether or not to noindex our categories. here.
-
I think that your "hub" pages can be category pages and more.
Imagine a hub page for widgets with.... "how to do it" articles down the left column, "widget reviews" down the center column, and tips on "how to enjoy widgets" down the right column.
These could look like your sample page or look like the homepage of Slate.com... or any other news site's homepage or category pages if you have enough content.
-
-
Nice, I think that is going to be killer. Let me know how it works.
-
Exactly. This is what I did for one such page last week.
-
"...use "hub" pages that link to all my other content. "
Yes, exactly. That is actually what we are working on next week. We are going to create hub pages for the entire website. They will link out to all of the best content for their topic that is both "on the blog" and "on the website". These will also link to product pages. We are going to use big juicy images on these hub pages to quickly communicate the topic and make them look colorful and fun.
The order of the items on these pages will be determined by what is getting clicked. So, stuff that is hot with the visitors will move to the top. These hub pages will also link to a few product sales pages that have generous amounts of informative content.
-
Thanks EGOL. Yes, I've realized that I need to have a strategy and to make a conscious decision to index or noindex. My category pages do pull in some SE traffic but I also have pages that compete directly with those category pages. In terms of content those specific pages (articles) are superior to the category pages too.
One other solution is what you did which is delete the category all together and use "hub" pages that link to all my other content.
I'm definitely going to do some reading and learning about this in the next couple weeks.
-
Heydarian, great to see you here.
This is a complex question. The answer of what to index and what to not index varies from situation to situation.
Let me give you examples and a little history for two sites...
**BLOG A ** (an industry news filter, kinda like Metafilter for an industry)
The site that I spend most of my time on has a blog that receives very skimpy posts. "You gotta see this widget". "This widget is really cool". "Acme invents a new green widget". Three years ago, I had post pages, category pages and a home page that all received lots of traffic. Then, after Panda, those skimpy post pages did not perform well and actually damaged the rankings for the entire site - because I had thousands of them. So, I noindexed all of the post pages and even deleted thousands of them a couple times per year because they were mostly "newsy" content. The category pages and homepage still received lots of traffic and the rankings for the rest of the site recovered nicely.
Then, I think google started looking at category pages that link to skimpy content pages and they started performing poorly. So, I changed the blog format to eliminate the post pages and the category pages. Now there is only a big homepage and pagination pages. This blog still is very successful because lots of people continue to visit it directly and subscribe to the feed - but I intentionally abandoned the post pages and category pages because Google has changed.
BLOG B (a product blog for a retail website)
On this blog the posts are detailed product reviews, detailed descriptions of how to do something, detailed quashes of misconceptions, etc. Each post has several photos and 500 to 2000 words. At first I was using about ten category pages, but after a couple years they still were not getting much traffic. Other pages of my site (not on the blog) competed with them and performed more strongly. So, I deleted the category pages from the blog, HOWEVER, I began to generously link to the topic pages on other parts of the website. The results have been positive.
So, the bottom line. I think that you have to look at many things:
-
Are your category pages pulling in traffic? If not, delete them, don't just noindex them unless lots of people are reading them. They are power sinks if you still have them on your site IMO.
-
Do you have superior pages on your site for the same topic? If you do, then give them your attention and promote them on your blog posts.
-
How does google treat pages like yours?
Then you gotta place your bets on a strategy. Hope that it works. Keep watching the analytics.
Good luck.
-
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
-
Do product sub-categories compete with top level categories for rankings?
Hi All, This question is for an eccomerce site with a very large sku count (over 3million individual sku's). As the person responsible for SEO on the site, I am often playing catchup to some of our web merchandisers. My question is this: Will creating sub-catagories that have a page title and H1 tag that include the top level category name plus a refinement be competing with each other and the top level category for rankings? The products that I am specifically talking about are Funko Pops! (some of you might collect them). There are different sub-sets of Funko Pops such as Funko Pop!: Rocks, Funko Pop!: Movies, Funko Pop! Television ect. Im worried that if I create many pages with these titles/h1 tags that they will end up competing for the query "funko pops"... something I worked hard to rank above Amazon for. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | Jason-Reid0 -
Will it upset Google if I aggregate product page reviews up into a product category page?
We have reviews on our product pages and we are considering averaging those reviews out and putting them on specific category pages in order for the average product ratings to be displayed in search results. Each averaged category review would be only for the products within it's category, and all reviews are from users of the site, no 3rd party reviews. For example, averaging the reviews from all of our boxes products pages, and listing that average review on the boxes category page. My question is, will this be doing anything wrong in the eyes of Google, and if so how so? -Derick
On-Page Optimization | | Deluxe0 -
URL Structure Category Pages -Current Moz Friday-
Hello,
On-Page Optimization | | _Heiko_
regarding #15 of the last moz friday I have a question: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls What would you prefer if the lenght of the URL will be still under 60 characters and you have an example like this: Let's call it a specific page in a category. As I like the old shoe examples: You have a page about red shoes in your shoe category. Which URL would you prefer: a) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red-shoe b) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red Personally I would prefer a) or would you already consider this as spammy? My real example is not that trivial like the shoe example and the categories will be in plural and the specific pages always in singular (like in the example shoes vs shoe). c) would be to put it independently from the side structure on www.mydomain.com/red-shoe - but personally I have the experience that a) or b) will help the rankings of the category page if you have the specific pages in the same subfolder. What's your opinion on this?1 -
Duplicate Content on Category Pages
Hi Everyone, I have a few category pages within a category for my eCommerce store and I've recently started writing a short description for each. However a lot of these paragraphs can be replicated for the same category. For instance '1 Inch thickness' I'll show all the information, and it'll be very similar to '2 inch thickness' but obviously one is 1 inch and one is 2 inch so I would only be changing one keyword and that is the thickness. I feel that this is helping customers because it has all the information in each category e.g. how to filter your choices. But it might be duplicate content. What would you recommend?
On-Page Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Different Categories, Same Meta Description?
I've heard that having duplicate meta descriptions is bad for SEO and can even be the cause of penalties. However, a duplicate meta description would make sense for different categories on many sites. So I'm wondering what the best solution is for a case like this? One of my sites has around 150 topics, and each topic page is exactly the same, aside from including only things that are related to that specific topic. So why would I want to create 150 different meta descriptions? Not only is it time consuming, and nearly impossible to create 150 unique descriptions for the same type of content, but it also serves no purpose for visitors coming from the search engines. A logical approach would be to use the same meta description and just switch out the topics in the description... but then all of those descriptions would be 95% the same - and I imagine Google might see that as spam. So... suggestions?
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Keyword Cannibalization/stuffing on an ecommerce category page
Hi, Whats the best way to tackle e-commerce category pages? If you have, say, a category showing 30 pairs of socks, and each of the sock products in the lists has a 'view more' link, a link from the product name and a link from the thumbnail. Naturally each of those links should be the product name - sprinkled with a slight variation, a preceding 'View more on [product name]' or superseded with the shop name, so you dont end up with complete duplicate link titles, you get the idea. But you suddenly end up with 90 instances of links with title tags containing 'socks', which ultimately lead to keyword stuffing/cannibalization - especially as you then move to another category with, say, sports socks showing 40 products and therefore 120 link titles also with the word 'socks' Thought on a postcard please? Thanks Tom
On-Page Optimization | | pretige120 -
Duplicate Title & Content in WordPress
I'm getting a lot of Crawl Errors due to duplicate content and duplicate title because of category and tag posts in WordPress. I rebuilt the sitemap and said to exclude category and tags, should that clear up the issue? I've also went through and did NO INDEX and NO FOLLOW for all categories and posts. Any thoughts on this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | seantgreen0 -
Wordpress Shortcodes Showing in SERPs
We use some Wordpress shortcodes in our theme and they aren't in the meta description at all. For certain queries, the shortcodes show on the SERPs when Google chooses the description for us -- is there any way to clean this up or prevent it? It's annoying because it includes the entire shortcode, not the markup that gets generated as a result of the shortcode...
On-Page Optimization | | kylesuss0