Wordpress: Should your blog posts be noindex?
-
Wordpress defaults all blog posts to no index/nofollow
Is this how it should be handled? I understand the nofollow from the page.com/blog to the page.com/blog/blogtitle
But why noindex? We have Yoast installed and this is the default.
-
Great! Best of luck, Courtney.
-
I did see this blog post a while back, and lost it....thanks for bringing it back to my attention. This is perfect!
-
Courtney, you may also find Dan Shure's guide on setting up Wordpress helpful.
-
If your blog posts are substantive in length and do not contain duplicate content then I would index/follow them. A good blog post on a popular topic can bring in a lot of traffic.
Category pages can also be set to index/follow if they contain very short excerpts of the blog posts and if they each have enough content to be substantive. When a blog is new and you have just one or two posts per category, each consisting of a short excerpt then I would not index them. What you can do is wait until you have several posts in a category before you start a category page.
A superior method of category page treatment, in my opinion, is to create a page that present all of your posts in a organization that is more logical the chronological default that you get in wordpress. Get a great image for each post and create a page that has your best posts, most popular posts, most recent posts presented for the visitor. New visitors should see your best or your most popular. Returning visitors want the new stuff. If there are posts that you want everyone to see they can be placed in a prominent position. This page can be rearranged if there is something hot in the news and you want to call attention to your writing on that topic. This will be a growing adaptive page that is much more visitor friendly than the chronological.
-
You blog posts should be indexed and followed. It may just be the default so development pages do not get indexed by search engines.
I would recommend using no index tags on the various category, archive, and tags pages that are created when using a WP blog. These pages can lead to a lot of duplicate content problems.
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
-
Google Not Picking Up Posts
I am trying to work out why from March 4th Google is not seeing my posts. Our google impressions have dropped from 8,000 to 40. If you put in the full article name with speach marks it does not find it, and instead shows the home page in google. We have not had any warnings. We did have work done on our site but nothing else i could think of to cause this. Can anyone let me know what may have caused this. All articles are original
Technical SEO | | headlinesplus0 -
Good to use disallow or noindex for these?
Hello everyone, I am reaching out to seek your expert advice on a few technical SEO aspects related to my website. I highly value your expertise in this field and would greatly appreciate your insights.
Technical SEO | | williamhuynh
Below are the specific areas I would like to discuss: a. Double and Triple filter pages: I have identified certain URLs on my website that have a canonical tag pointing to the main /quick-ship page. These URLs are as follows: https://www.interiorsecrets.com.au/collections/lounge-chairs/quick-ship+black
https://www.interiorsecrets.com.au/collections/lounge-chairs/quick-ship+black+fabric Considering the need to optimize my crawl budget, I would like to seek your advice on whether it would be advisable to disallow or noindex these pages. My understanding is that by disallowing or noindexing these URLs, search engines can avoid wasting resources on crawling and indexing duplicate or filtered content. I would greatly appreciate your guidance on this matter. b. Page URLs with parameters: I have noticed that some of my page URLs include parameters such as ?variant and ?limit. Although these URLs already have canonical tags in place, I would like to understand whether it is still recommended to disallow or noindex them to further conserve crawl budget. My understanding is that by doing so, search engines can prevent the unnecessary expenditure of resources on indexing redundant variations of the same content. I would be grateful for your expert opinion on this matter. Additionally, I would be delighted if you could provide any suggestions regarding internal linking strategies tailored to my website's structure and content. Any insights or recommendations you can offer would be highly valuable to me. Thank you in advance for your time and expertise in addressing these concerns. I genuinely appreciate your assistance. If you require any further information or clarification, please let me know. I look forward to hearing from you. Cheers!0 -
Should I noindex pages on my website that are pulled from an API integration
SEO/Moz newbie here! My organisation's website (dyob.com.au), uses an API integration to pull through listings that are shown in the site search. There is a high volume of these, all of which only contain a title, image and contact information for the business. I can see these pages coming up on my Moz accounts with issues such as duplicate content (even if they are different) or no description. We don't have the capacity to fill these pages with content. Here's an example: https://www.dyob.com.au/products/nice-buns-by-yomg I am looking for a recommendation on how to treat these pages. Are they likely to be hurting the sites SEO? We do rank for some of these pages. Should they be noindex pages? TIA!
Technical SEO | | monica.arklay0 -
Recipe Wordpress Plugin - Structured Data?
We have been using this plugin for years: https://wordpress.org/plugins/ziplist-recipe-plugin/ and it appears that it's causing us serious problems in Google. So we're looking for either a new plugin or possible directions on if we should custom build an option into our site. Ultimately we're looking for the best setup for the Recipes on our site to obtain a Featured Snippet. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | FabulesslyFrugal0 -
Sitemap For Static Content And Blog
We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site. We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year). But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently. How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed. I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones? I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
What's the best Blogging platform
A year ago an SEO specialist evaluated my Wordpress site and said she had seen lower rankings for Wordpress sites--in general. We moved our site off any cms and design in html 5. Our blog, however, is still on Wordpress. I'm thinking about moving to the Ghost platform b/c I only a blog. The drawbacks are one author, no recent post lists, no meta tags. Is it worth it to move the site off Wordpress. Will it affect my rankings much if I have great content? Does anyone have experience with or opinions on Ghost?
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Duplicate Page Title for multilingual wordpress site
Hello all, I have received my first crawl reports and I find a lot of errors of duplicate page title. In the wordpress site I use the qtranslate plugin in order to have the site in 2 languages. I also use the Yoast SEO plugin in order to put titles, description and keywords to each web page. By looking deeply in the duplicate page title errors I think I found that the problem is that every web page takes the same SEO Title for each language. But I am not 100% sure. I tried to use some shortcodes of the qtranslate plugin like the following ABOUT [:en]About in order to indicate and give different titles per language for one web page but that doesn't seem to work. Does anybody here has experienced the same problem as me? Do you have any suggestions about how to ressolve the problem of the duplicate page title? I can give you the URL of the website if you need it to have a look. Thank you in advanced for your help. I really appreciate that. Regards, Lenia
Technical SEO | | tevag0 -
Blog Categories or Static Pages
Background: We're creating a site that for a service provider on a wordpress platform, and it will include a blog with a page for each service category. Let's say the client is a wedding photographer we'd create a page for studio portraits, events, wedding, newborns, family etc. Question: Should each category page be a stand-alone page or a blog category? As a blog category it will be updated with new content continually and automatically. However, it could cause duplicate content issues as well as keyword dilution. Research: I've done research and obviously there are conflicting opinions - skip categories altogether, categories bring traffic, problems & solutions. I'm hoping for your opinion on the matter, or direction to content on the issue that will be helpful. Blog categories yay or nay?
Technical SEO | | 5225Marketing0