Disabling archives in wordpress

[LeahHutcheon]

Hi!

Do you think it better to:

a) have all archives crawled (date, time, category etc.) even though they create duplicate content,. or;

b) disable crawling of all archives?

Ideally, I'd like to set up just excerpts in the archives and have a unique intro for each, but I'm having trouble doing this just now so was wondering which is the smarter option in the meantime?

Thanks very much!

[LeahHutcheon]

Thank you, that's what I've done, so that's great.

Brilliant answer, very informative, so thank you.

[Robert_G]

Philip,

Letting Google to follow the archive pages, helps it to determine the website's hierarchy.

Google can handle duplicate content of a website.

Excluding tag or category archives from Google's index, may lead to loosing some visitors. Here is a nice wrap up regarding this issue.

If you use Yoast's SEO plugin, you can let Google index only the main page of the archive pages and noindex the rest of them (page1, page 2 etc.)

I would place a noindex meta tag for date archives, though.

Hope that helps, cheers.