What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?

[JaredDetroit]

I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great.

I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following:

• Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow
• Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post.

My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page.

My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself.

Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed?

The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).

[MauroMazzocchini]

Thank you for your update!

I agree with your tests and your solution is probably the best also from a user experience point of view: giving a nice description and useful links on category pages should improve the number of pageviews / time spent on site.

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for replying and giving us a status update. It's always great to know what happens with the advice so we can all learn. Glad to hear you're getting such good results!

[JaredDetroit]

For anyone that's interested in results, I've taken my blog that had everything nonindex, follow (categories and tags) and set categories to index, follow and tags to noindex, follow. I've seen about a 20% increase in traffic (not all due to this), my category pages are indexed and cached, and they're being used as entrance pages in some cases. Note that I did add good descriptions for these and I'm displaying them on the category page.

I also took another blog that had everything index, follow and changed it to the same that I just described. They have seen a reduction in their bounce rate and an increase in traffic.

On the same subject, I've also changed my paginated pages (archive pages 2+) to noindex, follow. They pretty much look the same as page 1 and they're pretty low quality landing pages. I've just added it but I noticed many recommendations to do it, Yoast.com does, and I see it on other big sites.

[JaredDetroit]

I think you may have hit on some key points here that kind of work into my initial thoughts:

• Amount of high quality content
• Highly organized category/tag structure

I believe that if you have these two key attributes for your site, having your categories and tags indexed would be very useful. In myself and the clients that I work with, I feel like the categories have plenty of high quality content but the tags are hit or miss.

From hearing the discussions of others and my own experience, I feel like having the categories indexed and the tags noindex would work out well but I think it's worth a shot to index my tags and see what happens. I'm sure Google and SEOmoz will let me know if I have some big dupliate content issues and I can easily monitor the traffic to these pages.

The interesting statistic for the tag pages will be the bounce rate...

[TKIGWebTeam]

Ryan, I have to say that you do bring a great point here and kudos to you on that. I think I may have jumped the gun a little bit in my initial response without considering the exact situation.

If you look at site like Compendium, along with Smashing Magazine and Noupe, they use this same method. Although, they a lot of high quality content, get tons of traffic and their category and tag structure are highly organized. This does work well, but from my experience, if you don't have all of those keys in place then you won't rank well for those categories in search results. On the other hand, here at SEOmoz, they do not have their tags and categories indexed, but they have the organization, traffic and content. Although, the only difference is that SEOmoz isn't using URL friendly slugs for these categories...

Maybe the better suggestion to Jared should be, try it both ways. Use noindex, follow at first for a month or so, then switch to indexing them. Test each method and see what results you get for your blog. It won't hurt your site in any way. I would just suggest that if you are going to index categories that you make sure you have thought through your level of organization.

[RyanOD]

I really wonder about this assumption that Google will ding a blog for duplicate content based on category and tag pages. As Jared pointed out typically those pages only show snippets. I don't know one way or the other, but I'm inclined to think Google is smart enough not to respond with a penalty. TKIG and Dan, I'm not disagreeing with you because I have no data to support one opinion or the other, but I'm very curious what you are basing your opinions on. FYI, this approach is nearly identical to the strategy Compendium uses to generate long tail search landing pages and they claim to have no duplicate content issues.

[JaredDetroit]

The Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast doesn't no index both by default and I would give him more authority on SEO than the all in one SEO pack. Maybe it's a "depends on the situation"?

I guess it sounds like noindex, follow tag pages there is a consensus but I'm surprised at everyone saying noindex, follow on the category pages. With providing a category description and only displaying an excerpt from the posts, I feel like you have a good page that should be indexed.

I guess that brings up a good question on the measure of duplicate content. Is seomoz pro crawler a good enough measure of duplicate content or is Google super sensitive?

[DanDeceuster]

The all in one seo pack plugin for wordpress automatically sets your category and tags pages to noindex, so that's a good clue right there. I never indesx them for duplicate content issues. I also don't index the date archives either. Of course I never link to them either or really use categories or tags, so it's never been much of an issue for me.

[TKIGWebTeam]

Tags and categories in Wordpress should always be set to noindex, follow. Why? Usually by allowing the search engines to index WordPress tags and categories you create duplicate content. If you have a lot of tags and categories you also create a numerous amount of non-signifcant search results for your domain.

EDIT: You are not hindering search results for potential visitors by not indexing your tags and categories. You are simply keeping them from being cached and indexed in search results. For SEO purposes it is much better to noindex, follow these pages.