Should I include tags in sitemap?

[LukeHutchinson]

Hello All,

I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content.

I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Luke Hutchinson.

[webestate]

Hi Dan The Yoast Seo plug in for Wordpress allows you to select what you want included on sitemaps. Mine currently includes posts, pages, categories, and video Are you suggesting to only include pages in the sitemap? Why wouldn't we want to include the others?

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Luke

Assume you mean XML Sitemap?

You should only include pages in your sitemap, which also are indexed. So then the question becomes, should you index tags or categories. I firmly believe, so long as the site is set up correctly, you should not index tags but it's OK to index categories. I also assume you're using WordPress.

So the steps become;

1. Noindex tag archives.

2. Then exclude tags from the XML sitemap.

You can refer to my WordPress SEO guide on Moz for more details.

Good luck!

-Dan

[JarnoNijzing]

Luke,

at this moment a new website is developed for me using Modx CMS. In here I had build a blog because I want to start blogging too. The funny part of it is that in many cases blog software creates duplicate content if you post an article and also have it stored in the archives etc. Modx does not seem to be doing that (so far as I tested it).

Maybe that would be something too look into?

The archives should be linking to the same article as the overview page does. The more tags and the more categories helps the user define what they are looking for and that ought to be a good thing. Here in the SEOmoz community you can also filter out certain blog messages, for instance if you only want to see white-board Friday messages that's possible. And I believe that these do not result in duplicate content issues.

Hope this helps you

Regards

Jarno