Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?
-
I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site.
The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with?
In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type?
Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.
-
Hi all,
I think it is first important to look at your category structure. Use categories as main categories and tags as subcategories. If you have 1 post, in 5 different main categories, you will then be duplicated in some cases the same info. I keep all my posts in one main category which I do index and then all the subcategories as (tags) which I have no-index on. Also, Yoast SEO is my favorite plugin. Just plain easy to use.
-
with hindsight I should have redesigned the blog pages to convert. The potential spend of the lost traffic was not harnessed
-
Wow, I'm chiming in almost three years later, but I think my question is pertinent. When you stopped indexing your category pages...did sales "happen" on your main website? I ask because you wrote that sales don't happen on your blog. I'm just wondering why sales are not happening on your blog and if it's a matter of funneling or the lack thereof?
-
my blog category pages began to rank higher for key converting search terms than my main website - not good - sales dont happen on my blog.
So I stopped the indexing of my category pages....guess what happened?..my website is back to position 1 BUT my blog traffic reduced by half.....so consider EGOL's warning prior to making a decision
-
Most of the search engine traffic that enters my blog comes in through category pages. It would be a huge mistake for me to block them. However, depending upon the topic area of your site the category pages might have a different importance.
-
Thank you very much for your answer.
I do have the all in one plugin installed, and my excerpts are not originally written, but taken from the articles so i will leave it no index.
Thanks again!
-
Hey Kevin,
Welcome to SEOmoz!
Since you are running a Wordpress set-up I would recommend downloading the All-in-one SEO plug-in. It's one of the most popular plugins for Wordpress installs because it helps you with your SEO configuration. Chances are you've probably already got this installed but I figured I would mention it in any case.
As to the no-index configuration of your category and archive pages; I would definitely recommend no-index on the archive pages because otherwise you run the risk of duplicate content, plus you don't really want those archive pages ranking for any of the keywords you are targeting.
For the category pages; if you are giving each post a unique excerpt and thus making the category pages unique in their own right, I would probably take the no-index tag off if only to aid link juice flow between categories and individual posts. If on the other hand you are not writing a unique excerpt for each post and instead showing the whole post or a modified version of the original, you run the risk of duplicating your content and this will greatly impact your ability to rank for the terms you are trying to target. In this case, keep the setup as it is.
Hope these points help.
Best,
Anthony
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
-
Random important product pages dropped out of index week ending Dec 22: why???
Hello We've been around a very long time, and I have a long running pet set of core terms and pages tracked using Moz and other tools. With no changes to the content or site or htaaccess or robots.txt or sitemap, insignificant backlink changes etc, we saw a ton of important product pages drop out of the index the week ending December 22 2019. We are still ranking for many of the terms associated, but at far worse positions since the pages G is choosing instead for those terms are not as focused. I need to be clear that this has not happened across the board, but seemingly at random. When I look in G Search Console, the pages are submitted and indexed (last crawl yesterday), mobile friendly, have breadcrumbs, and the only warning are product level for lack of optional fields under offers (nothing new, not particular to the dropped pages in question here). So, what happened the week ending December 22???? Should I expect the dust to settle and the pages to return? Extremely strange. Thx
On-Page Optimization | | jamestown0 -
Too many links per page? Double navigation on every page...
I have a client with navigation across the top of each page plus the same nav links in a sidebar on every page. Can that duplication (or the sheer number of links) on each page have a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | brm20170 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Index or No Index (Panda Issue)
Hi, I believe our website has been penalized by the panda update. We have over 9000 pages and we are currently indexing around 4,000 of those pages. I believe that more than half of the pages indexes have either thin content. Should we stop indexing those pages until we have quality page content? That will leave us with very few pages being indexed by Google (Roughly 1,000 of our 9,000 pages have quality content). I am worried that we would hurt our organic traffic more by not indexing the pages than by indexing the pages for google to read. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jim Rodriguez
On-Page Optimization | | dustyabe0 -
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Should I "No Index" Certain Pages On My Site?
I have some pages on my site that don't really have any content other than some iframes that are embedded from another site. I thought it would be best to tag the page with a no-index so that search engines would leave the page alone since it has no content as far as the search engine can tell (but does provide value to my site visitors). Is this the proper approach or does it do more harm than good?
On-Page Optimization | | Kyle Eaves0 -
What is the fastest way to re-index an important page?
Hello Moz Community Members, Besides submitting the URL in Google Webmaster, what are other ways to make sure google indexes/crawls a page which was noindexed?
On-Page Optimization | | SEMEnthusiast0 -
On Page Optimization Reports
How is it determined which terms and associated urls are chosen when SEOmoz tracks your On-Page Report Card? I'm receiving a lot of F Grades for terms I'm not really interested in and a lot of terms I'd like to be tracked aren't. Is there a way I can manually choose which terms and pages I'd like to be shown?
On-Page Optimization | | ClaytonKendall0