Should I noindex my categories?
-
Hello! I have created a directory website with a pretty active blog. I probably messed this up, but I pretty much have categories (for my blog) and custom taxonomy (for different categories of services) that are very similar. For example I have the blog category "anxiety therapists" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety".
1- is this a problem for google? Can it tell the difference between archive pages in these different categories even though the names are similar?
2- should I noindex my blog categories since the main purpose of my site is to help people find therapists ie my custom taxonomy?
-
Kind of exiting though. Everytime google picks up on a couple of URLs my rankings shoot up. Its exciting to see ^_^
-
That was part of my apprehension about deindexing my blog categories. They are ranking right now.....but I also pulled a dumb move and set all of my listing categories as noindex in Yoast a couple of months ago. Fixed this a month ago but still waiting on google to pick up on it. That's part of why I'm not sure about all of this. Not sure if things will change when google starts noticing my listing categories.
-
"insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which"
I've currently got it set up so that blog posts are
/category/anxiety
and listings are under
/listing-category/anxietyWould you say this is sufficient to indicate to google that these two are different?
-
If you have get organic traffic on categories you can index them. İf you dont get any traffic with categories on Serp dont use.
-
It's unlikely that if two pages are both very useful for a query, that Google would de-list one purely because it's from the same domain. If neither page is very high value in terms of content or popularity, what you are suggesting can happen. But instead of taking the 'easy' way out and de-indexing one, your end goal should be to make every page as useful as possible!
You will rarely ever benefit in the SERPs by doing a 'quick easy thing' which adds no value to your site, pages or the wider web. Always ask how you could be informing, educating or entertaining the web in a fresh new way which hasn't previously been done. If you're doing what has been done before, you need to do it at least 3-4x better to steal that audience and exceed the historic popularity of other information sources
If your categories really all are on the same level you might want to address that by having architectural (URL) layers to distinguish the categories. Whenever you say to yourself "I can't do better", that is a big problem as not all of your competitors will share that some mindset. Do you want to be the one who gets ahead? Then you need to push on!
insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which
I think you're right that your blogs may contain content that is more relevant to the queries which you have specified. That being said, de-indexing them doesn't magically make your commercial pages more relevant. It's not necessarily going to make your commercial pages rank better, or at all. As such - maybe doing heavier CRO on the non-commercial pages would be the most advisable solution!
If you ever find yourself thinking "aha I can do this quick clever thing to make Google do what I want instead of putting their users first" it's almost certainly the wrong tactic
-
Awesome! thank you for your response ^_^. I'm not so concerned about getting one to rank over the other as much as I'm concerned that having one will cause the other not to rank at all or be significantly dampened.
2 problems lol
-
I really couldn't come up with a good category structure, so I have 30-40 categories all on the same level. Its a therapist directory so all of the categories in question are pretty much diagnoses/therapeutic issues. I don't think I could create any better hierarchy....is that really bad?
-
I did something weird :-p. my blog categories are pretty much duplicates of my custom taxonomy but with "therapy" or "counseling" tagged on the end....I think it would be better to have my custom taxonomy set up this way because its about therapists and counselors, whereas my blog is about the subject in question....but my theme is set up in a way that would have made that look bad, resulting in long lists like this:
anxiety counseling
depression counseling
couples counseling
etc.
Do you think this is a problem? Should I go through all of the coding work to change it or would something like this make little difference to google? Ie if someone searches for anxiety therapy would the blog archive "anxiety therapy" be more likely to come up than the archive of actual therapists who work with anxiety called "anxiety" because the names suggest the blogs are more relevant to the search query?
-
-
This is an interesting question and I can see why, with many modern agencies focusing on 'keyword cannibalisation' you would consider this action. What you have to realise is that Google still largely sees the web as a mass of interconnected pages. If your blog categories supply decent enough content to rank for those related terms, there's no guarantee that if you turn them off - Google will make the same evaluation of your business-aimed (service-level) categories instead
That being the case, I'd actually let time and data lead the way. In Google Analytics you will probably find that some service-level categories gain more traffic, whilst for some categories their contextual blog iterations bring in more
You might consider learning more about CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). In my opinion, there's rarely a time where turning traffic off is beneficial. But could those blog category URLs be re-designed to point users more easily (and more often) to their commercial counterparts? Probably
I do tend to no-index 'tag' URLs as they are messy and non-hierarchical, they can fudge up your equity flow from A to B. But actual categories with a hierarchical structure? Those are pages which you do want to rank
You might also consider whether there's some clever way to just have one category which lists posts and also commercial offerings on a given thematic basis. Really, architectural unification should be your end goal!
Remember: there's absolutely no guarantee that de-listing one category type would cause the other to rank. They're very different pages with contextually different content. Keep an eye on both and strategize to one day, eventually bring them together. That's what I would do!
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
-
Should I noindex WooCommerce subcategories?
What's the best practice these days for handling indexing of WooCommerce product subcategories? Example: in the sitemap we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btetrault
/product-category-a/
/product-category-a/subcategory-1/
/product-category-a/subcategory-2/
etc. Should the /subcategory-*/ be noindexed, canonical to parent, or stay as indexed? Thanks!2 -
Stub category pages (dupe warning)
Hi I have a number of highly ranked category pages. However, at times these contain no products for a few weeks, etc. They are being flagged as duplicate content as they are just stub pages when they have no products, with the same "No products found" message. I don't want to risk 'noindex' ing the pages though - because as soon as they have products in, they become valuable pages and I would hate to lose a good ranking. Should I just leave them as-is and ignore the dupe warnings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benseb0 -
E-commerce category page optimization - filters vs. categories
Hi, We currently have a site where there are several subcategories for every main category. So this means that visitors will have to click through 3-4 subcategories before reaching products that they could have easily found if the site would be using filters on category pages. My question is - if a subcategory page with 4 products is currently a category page (optimized heading, description) and I'd want this category to be available through filters, how do I still keep it optimized for search engines? So under a category "Cleaners", we have all cleaning products. There are 8 "Cable cleaners" under this category. This is currently a subcategory, but I'd just solve this with a filter in the "Cleaners" screen. Not sure what's right from an SEO standpoint here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaanMSonberg0 -
301 redirection pointing to noindexed pages
I have rather an unusual situation where a recently launched affiliate site does not have any unique content as its all syndicated content. For that reason we are currently using the noindex,nofollow meta tags to keep the pages out of the search engines index until we create unique content for the pages. The problem is that due to a very tight timeframe with rebranding, we are looking at 301 redirecting (on a page to page basis) another high authority legacy domain to this new site before we have had a chance to add unique content to it and remove the noindex,nofollow tags. I would assume that any link authority normally passed through the 301 would be lost in this scenario but Im uncertain of what the broader impact might be. Has anyone dealt with a similar scenario? I know this scenario is not ideal and I would rather wait until the unique content is up and noindex tags are removed before launching the 301 redirect of the legacy domain but there are a number of competing priorities at play outside of SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LosNomads0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Google alerts for products and categories?
I get daily Google alerts for our site and a competitor's site. I have noticed that I am getting multiple alerts a day from Google about products and product categories on the competitor's site. Every now and then there's an actual alert for a linking blog post or something else. How is Google noticing new product on this site but has never done the same for ours? Is there some kind of strategy involved here that I don't know about? The site is http://bit.ly/Q0o2ob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
Crawl Budget on Noindex Follow
We have a list of crawled product search pages where pagination on Page 1 is indexed and crawled and page 2 and onward is noindex, noarchive follow as we want the links followed to the Product Pages themselves. (All product Pages have canonicals and unique URLs) Orr search results will be increasing the sets, and thus Google will have more links to follow on our wesbite although they all will be noindex pages. will this impact our carwl budget and additionally have impact to our rankings? Page 1 - Crawled Indexed and Followed Page 2 onward - Crawled No-index No-Archive Followed Thoughts? Thanks, Phil G
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Should I check Use noindex for Tag Archives?
I have a page indexed > (http://mysite.com/mypost) and also http://mysite.com/tag/mypost The same post shows up twice, one with /tag/ one without when I search site:http://mysite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinner-280241
Is this a duplicate content?? Can I get penalized for this? In the All in one plugin should I check Use noindex for Tag Archives to avoid this or doesn't matter.
Thanks0