Should I Block Tag, Category, Author Pages
-
Just finished reviewing the first crawl of my first SEOmoz campaign for a site that I am working on. The site I"m working on uses Wordpress as a CMS, and most if not all of the warnings and notices have to do with author, category, and tag pages. Should I block these from being indexed? Why or why not?
-
I have my blog set up so that I can easily get traffic data and revenue on categories, recent posts, and permalink pages.
All decisions on what to index, what to promote and where to place my effort are based upon that data.
-
Thanks for the quick response. These pages aren't generating traffic, and I am not even sure that they are indexed by Google. Most of the posts, patricularly the newer ones, use the canonical rel tag. Would there be any downside to blocking these pages?
-
It is possible that the same content is appearing at several locations on your site. That can lead to duplicate content problems or some of your linkjuice being wasted in the promotion of very similar pages. For example your category pages and tag pages might be almost identical.
If you have a very strong site you might get away with it.... or if you have a blog that gets a few posts per day the constant shuffle of content might be fast enough that google will not realize the amount of duplicate items that you have.
I would run analytics on the pages and see where the traffic is being pulled in before I make a decision. It is possible that some of your pages pull very little search traffic and there will be very little loss from blocking them from being indexed or cutting off links to them.
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
-
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Worth redirecting non-www to www due to higher page authority with www?
When checking my domain I receive higher page authority for www vs non-www. I am considering moving to the www url and applying the necessary redirections but wanted to quickly check if this is worth it. The root page authority https://www.diveidc.com : PA 40 https://diveidc.com : PA 35 By redirecting would I just be transferring over negative signals to the www domain, thus voiding the point for doing any redirect at all?
Technical SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Local City Pages
Anyone have any input on the tactics being used for a national company trying to target local city pages. For instance, you might be a national printing company and you are trying to compete against local printers in cities by creating a specific page for that city + print keywords.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
Using category pages in Wordpress
In our niche we have one main keyword, which represents the entire category. We are using wordpress. I am trying to understand the best URL structure and wonder if the below is a good approach: http://domain.com/keyword This category page will be written to contain an article on the subject. The posts that are put into that category will subsequently appear on this page, below that article. Each of those posts would be targeting a related keyword. e.g. I would write a post which has, as the main target keyword: "MainKeyword training" and another post, which would be targeting "MainKeyword techniques" ... (and so on). Thanks for your advice. Andrew
Technical SEO | | seowhiskey0 -
How do i raise my product pages authority - ecommerce
hi, just started here and going through my website to make sure everything is fine and relevant to the search terms i am aiming for. However i notice a lot of my pages have an authority of 1 which clearly isnt acceptable! how do i best go to modify this so the authority is risen?
Technical SEO | | GarethEJones0 -
Duplicate page error
SEO Moz gives me an duplicate page error as my homepage www.monteverdetours.com is the same as www.monteverdetours.com/index is this actually en error? And is google penalizing me for this?
Technical SEO | | Llanero0 -
What can be the cause of my inner pages ranking higher than my home page?
If you do a search for my own company name or products we sell the inner pages rank higher than the homepage and if you do a search for exact content from my home page my home page doesn't show in the results. My homepage shows when you do a site: search so not sure what is causing this.
Technical SEO | | deciph220