WordPress Duplicate Content Caused By Categories

[crazymikesapps1]

Hello,

We have a wordpress blog that has around 250 categories. Due to our platform we have a hierarchy structure for 3 separate stores. For example iPhone > Apps > Books.

Placing a blog post in the books category automatically places it into iPhone and iPhone/Apps category, causing 3 instances of any blog post in this category.

Is this an issue?

I have seen 2 schools of thought on categories, 1 index follow and 2 noindex follow. I know some of our categories get indexed, but with so many, maybe it is better to noindex them.

We also considered reducing our categories to 10 to 12 and use tags to provide the indexed site navigation as follows: Reviews  (category) iPhone Book App, iPhone App Store (tags) but this seems a little redundant?

Anyone want to take this on?

thank you

Mike

[AlanBleiweiss]

Mike,

I specialize in on-site audits and related consulting - sent you a private message through the Moz member system just now about it...

Alan

[crazymikesapps1]

Alan,

Excellent answer and we have been seeing slimmed down categories in our competitors, where they use tags to refine each post.

We are in need of some custom SEO consulting and training. We had a link audit and I am working on the results from that as far as Disavow goes. But, we need some specific site structure help, correct content creation help, and training.

Do you have any available services and available time in the near future for those services if we are a good fit?

thank you

Mike

[AlanBleiweiss]

This is definitely an issue.  While there are many ways to go about resolving it, and each one has its own limitations and its own advantages, for most sites I recommend the following to my audit clients:

Reduce the number of main categories to as few as is reasonable where the ones that remain are the "bucket" or "umbrella" topics. An ideal number of categories would be anywhere from ten to twenty, at most.  Any more than that overwhelms visitors and they become lost in the amount of time it takes to find what they want.  Also, with too many categories, you end up with not enough individual articles in several of them, making those "thin".

Keep tag implementation to a minimum as well so there's not significant cross-over there.  Each article should never have more than two, or at most three tags and tags should never be highly similar to categories or to other tags.

If any sub-categories exist, unless you can justify their value, it's best to noindex,nofollow those.  Noindex,follow is NOT needed when those same articles are linked to from a bucket level category. And it confuses, weakens page rank distribution.

When you do this, it's important to 301 redirect old category indexes to point to their new consolidated versions.

Also, be sure to use proper pagination optimization on the remaining indexable categories using rel-next / rel-prev in accordance with Google's pagination guidelines.