Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?
-
I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site.
The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with?
In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type?
Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.
-
Hi all,
I think it is first important to look at your category structure. Use categories as main categories and tags as subcategories. If you have 1 post, in 5 different main categories, you will then be duplicated in some cases the same info. I keep all my posts in one main category which I do index and then all the subcategories as (tags) which I have no-index on. Also, Yoast SEO is my favorite plugin. Just plain easy to use.
-
with hindsight I should have redesigned the blog pages to convert. The potential spend of the lost traffic was not harnessed
-
Wow, I'm chiming in almost three years later, but I think my question is pertinent. When you stopped indexing your category pages...did sales "happen" on your main website? I ask because you wrote that sales don't happen on your blog. I'm just wondering why sales are not happening on your blog and if it's a matter of funneling or the lack thereof?
-
my blog category pages began to rank higher for key converting search terms than my main website - not good - sales dont happen on my blog.
So I stopped the indexing of my category pages....guess what happened?..my website is back to position 1 BUT my blog traffic reduced by half.....so consider EGOL's warning prior to making a decision
-
Most of the search engine traffic that enters my blog comes in through category pages. It would be a huge mistake for me to block them. However, depending upon the topic area of your site the category pages might have a different importance.
-
Thank you very much for your answer.
I do have the all in one plugin installed, and my excerpts are not originally written, but taken from the articles so i will leave it no index.
Thanks again!
-
Hey Kevin,
Welcome to SEOmoz!
Since you are running a Wordpress set-up I would recommend downloading the All-in-one SEO plug-in. It's one of the most popular plugins for Wordpress installs because it helps you with your SEO configuration. Chances are you've probably already got this installed but I figured I would mention it in any case.
As to the no-index configuration of your category and archive pages; I would definitely recommend no-index on the archive pages because otherwise you run the risk of duplicate content, plus you don't really want those archive pages ranking for any of the keywords you are targeting.
For the category pages; if you are giving each post a unique excerpt and thus making the category pages unique in their own right, I would probably take the no-index tag off if only to aid link juice flow between categories and individual posts. If on the other hand you are not writing a unique excerpt for each post and instead showing the whole post or a modified version of the original, you run the risk of duplicating your content and this will greatly impact your ability to rank for the terms you are trying to target. In this case, keep the setup as it is.
Hope these points help.
Best,
Anthony
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
-
Page Optimization Error
Hi, I am trying to track a page optimization feature for one of my project, https://shinaweb.com but i keep getting this below error: "PAGE OPTIMIZATION ERROR
On-Page Optimization | | shinawebnavid
There was a problem loading this page. Please make sure the page is loading properly and that our user-agent, rogerbot, is not blocked from accessing this page." I checked robots.txt file, it all looks fine. Not sure what is the problem? Is it a problem with Moz or the website?0 -
Duplicate 'meta title' issue (AMP & NON-AMP Pages)
how to fix duplicate meta title issue in amp and non-amp pages? example.com
On-Page Optimization | | 21centuryweb
example.com/amp We have set the 'meta title' in desktop version & we don't want to change the title for AMP page as we have more than 10K pages on the website. ----As per SEMRUSH Tool---- ABOUT THIS ISSUE It is a bad idea to duplicate your title tag content in your first-level header. If your page’s <title>and <h1> tags match, the latter may appear over-optimized to search engines. Also, using the same content in titles and headers means a lost opportunity to incorporate other relevant keywords for your page.</p> <p><strong>HOW TO FIX IT</strong></p> <p>Try to create different content for your <title> and <h1> tags.<br /><br />this is what they are recommending, for the above issue we have asked our team to create unique meta and post title for desktop version but what about AMP page?<br /><br />Please help!</p></title>0 -
Is it better to keep a glossary or terms on one page or break it up into multiple pages?
We have a very large glossary of over 1000 industry terms on our site with links to reference material, embedded video, etc. Is it better for SEO purposes to keep this on one page or should we break it up into multiple pages, a different page for each letter for example? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | KenW0 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Should I optimize my home-page or a sub-page for my most important keyword
Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!
On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A2 -
Page rank check
Hello everyone, How long should I wait to see if page rank for optimized pages have improved? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
Best practice for Meta-Robots tag in categories and author pages?
For some of our site we use Wordpress, which we really like working with. The question I have is for the categories and authors pages (and similiar pages), i.e. the one looking: http://www.domain.com/authors/. Should you or should you not use follow, noindex for meta-robots? We have a lot of categories/tags/authors which generates a lot of pages. I'm a bit worried that google won't like this and leaning towards adding the follow, noindex. But the more I read about it, the more I see people disagree. What does the community of Seomoz think?
On-Page Optimization | | Lobtec0 -
Do we need to use the canonical tag on non-indexed pages?
Hi there I have been working in / learning SEO for just over a year, coming from a non dev background, so there are still plenty of the finer points on-page points I am working on. Slowly building up confidence and knowledge with the great SEOMoz as a reference! We are working on this site http://www.preciseuk.co.uk (we are still tweaking the tags and content by the way- not finished yet!) Because a lot of the information is within accordians, a page is generated for each tab of the accordian expanded, for example: http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php is the main page but then you also have: http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=0 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=1 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=2 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=3 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=4 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=5 All of which are in the same file. According to the crawl test, these pages are not indexed. Because it is all in one file, should we add the canonical tag to it, so that this is replicated in all the tab pages that are generated? eg. Thanks in advance for your help! Liz OneResult
On-Page Optimization | | oneresult
liz@oneresult.co.uk2