Wordpress: Should your blog posts be noindex?
-
Wordpress defaults all blog posts to no index/nofollow
Is this how it should be handled? I understand the nofollow from the page.com/blog to the page.com/blog/blogtitle
But why noindex? We have Yoast installed and this is the default.
-
Great! Best of luck, Courtney.
-
I did see this blog post a while back, and lost it....thanks for bringing it back to my attention. This is perfect!
-
Courtney, you may also find Dan Shure's guide on setting up Wordpress helpful.
-
If your blog posts are substantive in length and do not contain duplicate content then I would index/follow them. A good blog post on a popular topic can bring in a lot of traffic.
Category pages can also be set to index/follow if they contain very short excerpts of the blog posts and if they each have enough content to be substantive. When a blog is new and you have just one or two posts per category, each consisting of a short excerpt then I would not index them. What you can do is wait until you have several posts in a category before you start a category page.
A superior method of category page treatment, in my opinion, is to create a page that present all of your posts in a organization that is more logical the chronological default that you get in wordpress. Get a great image for each post and create a page that has your best posts, most popular posts, most recent posts presented for the visitor. New visitors should see your best or your most popular. Returning visitors want the new stuff. If there are posts that you want everyone to see they can be placed in a prominent position. This page can be rearranged if there is something hot in the news and you want to call attention to your writing on that topic. This will be a growing adaptive page that is much more visitor friendly than the chronological.
-
You blog posts should be indexed and followed. It may just be the default so development pages do not get indexed by search engines.
I would recommend using no index tags on the various category, archive, and tags pages that are created when using a WP blog. These pages can lead to a lot of duplicate content problems.
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Blog Location
We are planning on redesigning our homepage and are thinking of moving the location of our blog. Currently it is part of the main menu with a tab "Blog and News" Links to the top news article are also displayed below the fold. I checked with Google In-Page analytics and the news articles main link get 0.1% of the clicks and the blog&news don't get any clicks. The Marketing VP wants to move Blog&News to a link below the fold... which seems like it will send a message to Google we don't care about it and get it even less traction than we currently have in terms of visitors. Any suggestions of what we should do with it?
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
I'm getting duplicate content created with a random string of character added to the end of my blog post permalinks?
In an effort to clean up my blog content I noticed that I have a lot of posts getting tagged for duplicate content. It looks like ... http://carwoo.com/blog/october-sales-robust-stateside-european-outlook-poor-for-ford http://carwoo.com/blog/october-sales-robust-stateside-european-outlook-poor-for-ford/954bf0df0a0d02b700a06816f2276fa5/ Any thoughts on how and why this would be happening?
Technical SEO | | editabletext0 -
Guest Blog Posts (Originally Seen on . .)
We are making a push to get our blog posts featured on other blogs, and bring in guest bloggers. We figured we could just repost a blog post on our blog, and link back to the original post. Obviously this provides some link juice, but do you think it's a bad idea because of duplicate content? Specifically, I'm also a Huffington Post blogger, so I have the option of writing an article, posting it on our site and HuffPo, and linking back to the original to give us links. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | moziodavid0 -
Weebly Blog
Hello, Previously I asked if I should remove my blog from Weebly if I cannot change the page titles as they are being reported as duplicates. The answer was,yes and I headed to Weebly to remove it. Upon looking closer, every page and post does in fact show a different address. Now Im confused, I dont see duplicates but the campaign lists all the blog pages and states they are duplicates. I'm not sure what to do. Am I misunderstanding duplicate page? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | Gardengirl0 -
Redirect blogspot blog ?
Hi We have an ecom site selling childrens clothing. We startet up with a blogspot blog due to the lack of that option from our provider. I have a few links in to the blogspot blog and realized today that the PA is 39 - the PA of homepage of ecom site is 40. Ive lately been using the ..../blog on my ecom site. The functionality so far of it is so bad that i am considering using the blogspot blog again. How can i best utilize the strength of our blog at blogspot. Just keep posting w anchor text to relevant pages our main site? Is redirecting a possibility at all ? Dan Lærum
Technical SEO | | danlae0 -
How do I add meta descriptions to Archives in Wordpress?
My most recent crawl returned a number of 'missing meta description' errors, and when I checked individual URLs, it turned out they were Wordpress Archived pages - for individual months and days (e.g. http:// .../2011/01). What's the best way to go about adding descriptions to these pages, if at all? Or should I have these pages not be indexed? I am using the All in One SEO plugin, so maybe there is an easy fix through this plugin, or it may be the cause of these errors? Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance! **EDIT After looking it up further, I have decided to use noindex for Archives, which should solve my problem right? Or is there a benefit to having those archived pages?
Technical SEO | | NetPicks0 -
How rel=canonical works with index, noindex ?
Hello all, I had always wondered how the index,noindex affects to the canonical. And also if the canonical post should be included in the sitemap or not. I posted this http://www.comparativadebancos.co... and with a rel=canonical to this that was published at the beginning of the month http://www.comparativadebancos.co... but then I have the first one in google http://www.google.com/search?aq=f... May be this is evident for you but, what is really doing the canonical? If I publish something with the canonical pointing to another page, will it still be indexed by google but with no penalty for duplicate content? Or the usual behaviour should have been to havent indexed the first post but just the second one? Should I also place a noindex in the first post in addition to the canonical? What am I missing here? thanks
Technical SEO | | antorome0