Should we "no-follow" archives or categories?
-
I'm reading some reports from my first crawl of 10K pages and I'm wondering if it's wise to mark the archives "no-follow."
I have a WP tool that provides a tool that offers the no follow for categories or archives recommending to choose either one or the other but not both.
What would be the best solution?
-
Just use an SEO plugin and canonicalize allt he archives and categories, don't use no-follow as it is a will suck away your pagerank. If you must you could also use the metaname robots and set it to follow, noindex
btw I think Pashmina should win an award for cutest SEO on seomoz
-
One problem with Wordpress Themes, and not all of them by any means, but they are set up for blogrolls or they list your pages/categories/archives (in my case all three).
With all the posts I have it seems dangerous to change themes at this point as the site may become non-recognizable or I may very well break what isn't necessarily broke.
As far as indexing goes I'm over 90-percent indexed, not bad when you consider the nature of the blog with block quotes that are not original content when added to enrich to full meaning of something I'm blogging about.
Another problem with these designs is you may show any number of posts per pages and Moz is crawling individual posts, pages with multiple posts and actually multiplying the number of posts reflecting duplicate content falsely. I'm also getting "too many links" notices because of the design. But I digress.
In my plugin I simply clicked archives and doubt it will make too much difference. Let's see if anyone else has some input.
Thanks Pashmina
-
You'll probably get some different opinions on this. Your site link architecture and the design of your archive/search/category needs to be assessed to figure out the best solution.
If I had to pick one or the other for the nofollow attribution, I'd pick the Archives over Categories because they have less keyword value. Generally, I'd say no need to use it. Sure, you might say that those pages don't have much value since all they contain is a repetition of content on your other pages. And some may try to use the "nofollow" tag as a way to prevent any link juice from flowing to those pages. But PageRank sculpting using this tactic isn't really effective.
It would be more effective for your SEO to redesign your blog/website sidebar/footer links so that you have "less" links pointing to your Archives and/or categories.
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
-
How to uncover GA "Not Provided" organic keywords?
Hello, Google Analytics has a lot of keywords which are tagged as "Not Provided" So how can i uncover what these are? Otherwise how do i know which organic keywords are doing well or not?
Reporting & Analytics | | Riz_Khan0 -
I have a WP site which uses categories to display the same content in several locations. Which items should get a canonical tag to avoid a ding for duplicate content?
So...I have a Knowledge Center and press room that pretty much use the same posts. So...technically the content looks like its on several pages because the post shows up on the Category listing page. Do I add a Canonical tag to each individual post...so that it is the only one that is counted? Also...I have a LONG disclaimer that goes at the bottom of most of the posts. would this count as duplicate content? Is there a way to markup a single paragraph to tell the spiders not to crawl it?
Reporting & Analytics | | LindsayiHart0 -
Apple.com showing in Google Analytics "My Top Active Pages" - Why?
Hi Mozzers This has more than likely been asked before but my searches have left me empty handed so I have asked on here ( sorry! ) Please see attached screenshot, do you have any idea why apple.com is showing in my top pages? I'm just curious more than anything as this isn't the first time I've noticed it. Anybody know? Happy Friday people, cheers Jamie CiTCA5b.png
Reporting & Analytics | | SanjidaKazi1 -
Sudden dramatic drop in "some but not all" keyphrase rankings for client, 3 weeks ago
I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50. What could have happened? I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change? And even more importantly, how do I fix it?
Reporting & Analytics | | chill9860 -
Do PPC clicks get attributed to "Organic" in Analytics?
Hey guys, This month I started running a PPC campaign for a client and have noticed that none of the click data is showing up in Analytics under "Paid". However, under the "Organic" section, I've noticed that we're gaining a lot more clicks through to the site for some of our targeted keywords than we have been in previous months. Is this just a coincidence or is the PPC click data being used under the Organic section of Analytics?
Reporting & Analytics | | Webrevolve0 -
What does "on first page" mean in seomoz ranking reports?
Hi - When reports here show numbers of keywords appearing "on first page", there must be some implicit assumption made about the number of results listed per page. 1. Can anyone tell me what that assumption is? Is it 10? 20? 2. What about universal results Local links? If the answer to number one is, for instance, 20 results per page, then are there any assumptions made about the number of universal results Local links included? I'm just trying to understand what the reports mean. Thanks, Tim
Reporting & Analytics | | tcolling0 -
When one of my sites returns a ranking that consistently reads "No Data", what does that say about the site?
I am getting "No Data" reads for some of my sites - I personally think it has to do with the site's construction - especially the landing page... I inherited this site to do SEO - it was not created with on site SEO in mind - please help if you can sites are: www.storagesanangelo.com www.storagemidland.com Should I get webmaster to remove the big map graphic and add text and pics instead... Sure appreciate brilliant thoughts - even about yetis and beer
Reporting & Analytics | | creativeguy0 -
"It appears there's a problem with our connection to your Google Analytics ...
account. Please go to your Settings page to update your connection." I set up a GA account for our website (www.edao.biz) prior to creating the SEO campaign. When I set up the campaign it told me there was a problem. I tried to fix the connection using the Settings page and it created a second account - however, it still cannot connect to it. In the GA account, it shows that I have granted access to pro.seomoz.org. I did not setup a 2-step verification with GA; don't think that's the issue. Should I blow both GA accounts away and try again? I don't think it's working correctly, and I would really like to be able to see the analytics for our site. I did see that in the GA account I had checked [v] Share my Google Analytics data... [v ] with other Google products only. - What should be the proper setting? (BTW I'm a bit lost with the new GA, I still go to the old interface (though ugly, it shows more links and info)) Thank you, Ingrid
Reporting & Analytics | | IngridWood0