What's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX

[smstv]

Hello Mozers;

I am having an issue, my client has 10K pages on their site; in WP, and they have a classified section.

Question #1: I am asking, what's better for seo, NOINDEX, or INDEX, for their Classified section.

They currently have no SEO plug ins, that fix their errors, and warnings.

Question #2: My question is also, do I want the Categories crawled, or INDEXED or NOINDEX?

Check out their Campaign results by Moz:

• Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters)

  32

• Too Many On-Page Links

  9,032

• Missing Meta Description Tag

  6,234

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you want someone to confirm Matts answer I would do the same thing.

Hope that help,

Thomas

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi

I personally would say that you want all your classifieds ads indexed (INDEX) as they will help with your long tail traffic from the search engines. I used to run a classified ads section on a site that I ran and the classified ads system picked up a fair amount of long tail traffic. In turn this helped drive more traffic and conversions through the site as a whole.

Have you considered adding a plugin like Yoast SEO? This is an excellent tool and it will help you sort out your Moz Campaign results.

Have a look here - http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

As far as too many on-page links goes moz reports what is best standard but I can tell you from experience that I have had successful sites redesigned and there on-page links have increased to above this threshold so have been flagged by Moz. However my rankings went up even with this issue because it made sense from a users perspective so I stuck with it and it paid off.

Meta descriptions are your page description and call to action so not having them misses out on the added benefit of enticing a potential visitor from the SERPs. However Google is pretty good at determining what meta to incorporate and this element doesn't directly affect your rankings. I used to have a summary section/text box that users had to enter a short description into in order to submit a classified. This was also used to populate meta description. It just made this element easier to populate and make unique I found.

FINAL NOTE - just to be clear you don't want to restrict access to any of your sites content in terms classified adds and their categories - the more unique content that is indexed the better it is for your SEO - more chances of picking up traffic especially from the long tail specific searches.

I hope this helps