Index or not index Categories
-
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc.
Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct.
Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this.
Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
-
No problem at all, glad I could help!
Good luck with the site!
-
You are really amazing Lewis! I understand what you mean with no indexing the pages 2, 3 etc..Yoast has there such option that I can mark it and it will not be indexing them.
Thank you so much for the tool you gave me to visit yoast site!!! It worked! Now I can learn more about it and figure out what is the best. This is clear that they have blocked ips from Kenya, although they have claimed they do not do that, and we paid almost 100usd for the plugin
Thank you very much Lewis!
-
Hi Iris,
Yes, you want the URLs to be included in the sitemap too as this is what the search engines will use to build a map of your website and list them in their search engines.
With regards to your duplicate page issue, this is to do with your pagination of the pages. There's a guide here which tells you the SEO best practices when it comes to handling pagination, so hopefully this will help - http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
Really, you don't want those additional pages to be picked up in the search engines, so a fix will need to be sorted for that. You'll probably need to find a developer / a plugin to allow you to not index the /2 /3 pages etc.
I don't do much work with Wordpress, so maybe someone else could advise you with regards to the archive section. If your categories and posts are indexed, then I would have thought that you've done the correct thing with the archives and set them to noindex. That being said, I have limited knowledge of carrying out SEO for wordpress so I would need to take a closer look into that to give you a better response..
Hope this helps at least a little!
On a separate note, you could try accessing the Yoast website through a proxy such as http://hidemyass.com/ - Might be worth a go?
-
You are amazing Lewis, thank you so much for your time. The posts in categories are displayed only with short summary, so I guess it should be alright then. Should they also be all included in the sitemap? I am very scared of duplicate content.
Also every category has approximately 3 pages and now the moz crawl shows me that I have duplicate pages like this below and that it does not know which one is canonical:
I am not sure how to sort this out.
I have there also some archive post which says under: "Note: instead of templates these are the actual titles and meta descriptions for these custom post type archive pages."
I set the archives on noindex as i do not want the archives with post shoved in search result, but the categories. I hope this is correct. There are also some options and media, oh my god it's killing me:-( I have no idea what it is.
The reason why I am so annoying with this is that I can't access yoast site, his support team is looking into it why, but did not get back to me yet:-( I guess they have blocked ips from Kenya although they said me they don't do this.
Thank you very much Lewis for all you have done for me already!
-
I'm not sure if I fully understand your question, but I'll give it my best shot to answer it.
If I was in your position, I would set the Yoast plugin to index both the categories and the posts, but make sure that the posts only show a short summary / the first 'x' number of words than the post. The reason behind doing this is similar to how an ecommerce store works.
On eCommerce stores, you have your categories which are used as funnels to find inner product pages. Categories are generally set to be indexed as they combine lots of relevant data for a user which helps create a better user experience. In your case, your category may be 'Villas' and inside that, you may list 20 individual Villas. If you didn't have your category pages indexed, you'd be relying on the search engine to filter a user down to either your homepage or one specific villa which you hope is right for the users choice (which most likely will result in a higher bounce rate).
Again, I'm not sure if I've understood exactly what you're looking for, but that's what I would recommend if you're asking which sections of your site should be indexed. Hope this helps!
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
-
Does google index the mobile version or the desktop version?
We use different headlines and text on our mobile site vs. the desktop. Our desktop headlines and text is highly optimized for SEO purposes, but because of user experience and space limitations the headlines and text on the mobile version isn't great for SEO. I'm wondering, what will google look at and will it make a difference? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Postable0 -
App Index Knowledge Graph Link
Is it possible to App Index within a knowledge graph? I would like to app index my app within the knowledge graph instead of it going to the website but is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
Old pages STILL indexed...
Our new website has been live for around 3 months and the URL structure has completely changed. We weren't able to dynamically create 301 redirects for over 5,000 of our products because of how different the URL's were so we've been redirecting them as and when. 3 months on and we're still getting hundreds of 404 errors daily in our Webmaster Tools account. I've checked the server logs and it looks like Bing Bot still seems to want to crawl our old /product/ URL's. Also, if I perform a "site:example.co.uk/product" on Google or Bing - lots of results are still returned, indicating the both still haven't dropped them from their index. Should I ignore the 404 errors and continue to wait for them to drop off or should I just block /product/ in my robots.txt? After 3 months I'd have thought they'd have naturally dropped off by now! I'm half-debating this: User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamMcArthur
Disallow: /some-directory-for-all/* User-agent: Bingbot
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /product/ Sitemap: http://www.example.co.uk/sitemap.xml0 -
How to do Country specific indexing ?
We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries Can someone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozil0 -
H2 vs. H3 Tags for Category Navigation
Hey, all. I have client that uses tags in the navigation for its blog. For example, tags might appear around "Library," "Recent Posts," etc. This is handled through their WordPress theme. This seems fairly standard, but I wonder whether tags are semantically appropriate. Since each blog post is fairly lengthy (about 500-1000 words) with multiple tags, would it be more appropriate to use tags for this menu navigation? Are we cutting into the effectiveness of our tags by using them for menu navigation? The navigation is certainly an important page element, and it structures content, so it seems that it should use some header tag. Anyways, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. I'm a content creator, not an SEO, so this is a bit out of my skillset.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ask44435230 -
Google Indexed my Site then De-indexed a Week After
Hi there, I'm working on getting a large e-commerce website indexed and I am having a lot of trouble.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
The site is www.consumerbase.com. We have about 130,000 pages and only 25,000 are getting indexed. I use multiple sitemaps so I can tell which product pages are indexed, and we need our "Mailing List" pages the most - http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/cigar-smoking-enthusiasts-mailing-list.html I submitted a sitemap a few weeks ago of a particular type of product page and about 40k/43k of the pages were indexed - GREAT! A week ago Google de-indexed almost all of those new pages. Check out this image, it kind of boggles my mind and makes me sad. http://screencast.com/t/GivYGYRrOV While these pages were indexed, we immediately received a ton of traffic to them - making me think Google liked them. I think our breadcrumbs, site structure, and "customers who viewed this product also viewed" links would make the site extremely crawl-able. What gives?
Does it come down to our site not having enough Domain Authority?
My client really needs an answer about how we are going to get these pages indexed.0 -
How is Google crawling and indexing this directory listing?
We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/ http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why. If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site? Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content. For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems. Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result? For example: Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/ Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/ Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed? Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Cross linking between categories
Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ? I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... ) but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?0