Duplicate Content and Other Issues from Blog Tags and Categories

[jgoethert]

I have recently taken over the maintenance/redesign of our website and after setting up Moz I see many errors:
Duplicate content
Missing descriptions
Duplicate titles
etc.

All are related to blog categories and tags.

My questions are: are these errors hurting us? Should I simply remove tags/categories from the sitemaps or bite the bullet and create content for every single category page?

Our site is https://financiallysimple.com/ and we are using Yoast plugin in Wordpress  (if that helps)

[jgoethert]

Roman,

Good info here... still studying to try to make sense of how the "boxer" example (with very similar products) translates to "taxes" or "retirement" where every article is (supposed to be) very different.

Thanks again.
John

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Hi James Wolff  I sent you an inbox

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Cornerstone content
Cornerstone articles are the most important articles on your website. This is the content that exactly reflects your business. These articles should be relatively high in your site structure. In most cases, the
homepage directly links to these articles. If you could think of 4 pages you would like someone to read in order to tell them about your site or company, these would need to be the cornerstone articles. Therefore, these articles should focus on the mission or the most important products of your website or company.

Taxonomies: Categories and Tags
Implementing categories and tags on your website is an important way to add structure to it. These taxonomies group content on a certain topic. When used properly, Google will understand the
structure of your site better. Categories have a hierarchical structure. There can be subcategories
within categories. Tags do not have a hierarchical structure. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index.

Categories and tags on your website is an important way to add structure to it. These taxonomies group content on a certain topic. When used properly, Search Engines will understand the structure of your site better. Categories have a hierarchical structure. There can be subcategories within categories. Tags do not have a hierarchical structure. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index.

Duplicate content
Duplicate content means that the same content is shown on multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you’ll get the content you came for. But it confuses a search engine: it has to pick
which one to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice.

Above that, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, and others link to the second URL. If these duplicates were all linking to the same URL, your chance of
ranking in the top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. The solution for duplicate content is a so-called canonical link. A canonical link tells the search engines: yes, this content is duplicate,
and this one is the original content.

Category archives are landing pages
Your category archives are more important than individual pages and posts. Those archives should be the first result in the search engines. That means those archives are your most important landing pages. Thus, they should also provide the best user experience. The more likely your individual pages are to expire, the more this is true. In a shop your products might change, making your categories more important to optimize. Otherwise, you’d be optimizing pages that are going to be gone a few weeks/months later.

2 Categories prevent individual pages from competing
If you sell boxers and you optimize every product page, all those pages will compete for the term ‘boxers’. You should optimize them for their specific brand and model, and link them all to the ‘boxers’ category page. That way the category page can rank for ‘boxer’, while the product page can rank for more specific terms. This way, the category page prevents the individual pages from competing.