Should I noindex my categories?
-
Hello! I have created a directory website with a pretty active blog. I probably messed this up, but I pretty much have categories (for my blog) and custom taxonomy (for different categories of services) that are very similar. For example I have the blog category "anxiety therapists" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety".
1- is this a problem for google? Can it tell the difference between archive pages in these different categories even though the names are similar?
2- should I noindex my blog categories since the main purpose of my site is to help people find therapists ie my custom taxonomy?
-
Kind of exiting though. Everytime google picks up on a couple of URLs my rankings shoot up. Its exciting to see ^_^
-
That was part of my apprehension about deindexing my blog categories. They are ranking right now.....but I also pulled a dumb move and set all of my listing categories as noindex in Yoast a couple of months ago. Fixed this a month ago but still waiting on google to pick up on it. That's part of why I'm not sure about all of this. Not sure if things will change when google starts noticing my listing categories.
-
"insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which"
I've currently got it set up so that blog posts are
/category/anxiety
and listings are under
/listing-category/anxietyWould you say this is sufficient to indicate to google that these two are different?
-
If you have get organic traffic on categories you can index them. İf you dont get any traffic with categories on Serp dont use.
-
It's unlikely that if two pages are both very useful for a query, that Google would de-list one purely because it's from the same domain. If neither page is very high value in terms of content or popularity, what you are suggesting can happen. But instead of taking the 'easy' way out and de-indexing one, your end goal should be to make every page as useful as possible!
You will rarely ever benefit in the SERPs by doing a 'quick easy thing' which adds no value to your site, pages or the wider web. Always ask how you could be informing, educating or entertaining the web in a fresh new way which hasn't previously been done. If you're doing what has been done before, you need to do it at least 3-4x better to steal that audience and exceed the historic popularity of other information sources
If your categories really all are on the same level you might want to address that by having architectural (URL) layers to distinguish the categories. Whenever you say to yourself "I can't do better", that is a big problem as not all of your competitors will share that some mindset. Do you want to be the one who gets ahead? Then you need to push on!
insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which
I think you're right that your blogs may contain content that is more relevant to the queries which you have specified. That being said, de-indexing them doesn't magically make your commercial pages more relevant. It's not necessarily going to make your commercial pages rank better, or at all. As such - maybe doing heavier CRO on the non-commercial pages would be the most advisable solution!
If you ever find yourself thinking "aha I can do this quick clever thing to make Google do what I want instead of putting their users first" it's almost certainly the wrong tactic
-
Awesome! thank you for your response ^_^. I'm not so concerned about getting one to rank over the other as much as I'm concerned that having one will cause the other not to rank at all or be significantly dampened.
2 problems lol
-
I really couldn't come up with a good category structure, so I have 30-40 categories all on the same level. Its a therapist directory so all of the categories in question are pretty much diagnoses/therapeutic issues. I don't think I could create any better hierarchy....is that really bad?
-
I did something weird :-p. my blog categories are pretty much duplicates of my custom taxonomy but with "therapy" or "counseling" tagged on the end....I think it would be better to have my custom taxonomy set up this way because its about therapists and counselors, whereas my blog is about the subject in question....but my theme is set up in a way that would have made that look bad, resulting in long lists like this:
anxiety counseling
depression counseling
couples counseling
etc.
Do you think this is a problem? Should I go through all of the coding work to change it or would something like this make little difference to google? Ie if someone searches for anxiety therapy would the blog archive "anxiety therapy" be more likely to come up than the archive of actual therapists who work with anxiety called "anxiety" because the names suggest the blogs are more relevant to the search query?
-
-
This is an interesting question and I can see why, with many modern agencies focusing on 'keyword cannibalisation' you would consider this action. What you have to realise is that Google still largely sees the web as a mass of interconnected pages. If your blog categories supply decent enough content to rank for those related terms, there's no guarantee that if you turn them off - Google will make the same evaluation of your business-aimed (service-level) categories instead
That being the case, I'd actually let time and data lead the way. In Google Analytics you will probably find that some service-level categories gain more traffic, whilst for some categories their contextual blog iterations bring in more
You might consider learning more about CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). In my opinion, there's rarely a time where turning traffic off is beneficial. But could those blog category URLs be re-designed to point users more easily (and more often) to their commercial counterparts? Probably
I do tend to no-index 'tag' URLs as they are messy and non-hierarchical, they can fudge up your equity flow from A to B. But actual categories with a hierarchical structure? Those are pages which you do want to rank
You might also consider whether there's some clever way to just have one category which lists posts and also commercial offerings on a given thematic basis. Really, architectural unification should be your end goal!
Remember: there's absolutely no guarantee that de-listing one category type would cause the other to rank. They're very different pages with contextually different content. Keep an eye on both and strategize to one day, eventually bring them together. That's what I would do!
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
-
Deep level category pages not ranking well
Hi Guys, I have pages which are 3 levels deep on this site: **https://tinyurl.com/y7bnwkms ** They are barely ranking even though we have optimised them with category based content. Now it seems it might be a internal linking issue. Also noticed ahrefs has not visited the URL yet. So we are in the processing of installing breadcrumbs, building links from level 2 categories to level 3 (which is that url above) plus building links from blog to these level 3 pages. Also links are all in the sitemap. Besides that do you see anything else we can do? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bridhard80 -
Google Panda question Category Pages on e-commerce site
Dear Mates, Could you check this category page of our e-commerce site: http://tinyurl.com/zqjalng and give me your opinion about, this is a Panda safe page or not? Actually I have this as NOINDEX preventing any Panda hit, but I'm in doubt. My Question is "Can I index this page again in peace?" Thank you Clay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages
Hello Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages? I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO. Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio. Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all? Thanks for your time 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Optimize the category page or a content page?
Hi, We wish to start ranking on a specific keyword ("log house prices" in italian). We have two options on what pages we should optimize for this keyword: A long content page (1000+ words with images) Log houses category page, optimized for the keyword (we have 50+ houses on this page, together with a short price summary). I would think that we have better chances with ranking with option nr.2 , but then we can't use that page for ranking with a more short-tail keyword (like "log houses"). What would you suggest? Is there maybe a third option for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
Why some category posts not rank well on Google?
Hello! I have a wired issue. Some categories blog post rank well on the Google, but some of them not in the Google's first 10 page. For an instance if my windows computer related post rank well, but Linux computer related posts not rank well on the Google. After published all the posts, I bookmark them 5-8 bookmarking sites (80% of them do-follow). All of these bookmarking sites have PR 3-6. What could be the reason? And how do I improve their ranking? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Godad0 -
Organising Blog categories for SEO and usability.
Hello! I'm a professional photographer and have used categories in an old blog to separate my work. (weddings, portraits, etc.) I'm starting an new blog and everything was imported, except categories so as i started rewriting them, I noticed the 'personalised URL. So I was thinking of re-writing my categories based on types of jobs and location. For example: *North Wales -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography *Cheshire -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography and so on... Or do you think it's best to just have shoot style categories? What do you guys think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0 -
Noindex junk pages with inbound links?
I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem. A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that... and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text... nice number of footprints.) Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page's keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don't want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda's filter. They've got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original...). So I'm thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters. Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I'm considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I'm open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely. What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why? p.s. I'm asking this on my blog (seoroi.com/blog/ ) too, so if you're up for me to quote you (and link to your site, do say so. You aren't guaranteed to be quoted if you answer here, but it's one of the easier ways you'll get a good quality link. p.p.s. Related note: I'm looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for my blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you're interested. You can also PM me here on SEOmoz, though I don't login as frequently.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-Goldenberg0