Tags and Categories Ranking
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Hello
A few times I have come across tags and categories ranking for some relevant search terms.
This seems strange as all category and tag pages would have 0 external links back to them - whereas pretty much every other page on the site would have external links.
In most cases thy seem to rank along with the page, for example: for the search term "voiceover recording xxxxx" The voice over recording page will rank, followed by a similar tag page...
If I make the tag links 'nofollow' would that help stop this?
Cheers
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Could using canonical links help in this situation? I guess if I have no external links to the category pages then canonical links wouldn't be appropriate here?
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The nofollow option would solve the problem.
In a website I run, some tags and categories rank better than other pages but that, for the user, is a good thing so I let them be like that.
In you case, I think it´s totally different.
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In addition to Ria: Yoast will give you the option to give priory to pages. This is a % where you can devaluate the tag pages. http://kb.yoast.com/article/216-can-i-change-the-sitemap-priority.
Good luck!
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If you don't want your tags and categories to be showing up in Google (which is usually the case if they're just there for easy user navigation on-site), then I would recommend noindexing those bad boys completely. If you're using Wordpress, there's a plugin called Yoast SEO that will allow you to do that easily if you don't want to mess around with code.
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