Blog archives vs individual articles
-
In a client's blog, you can find each individual article pages as well as aggregate of articles per month or sometimes per day (including each entire article).
The problem is that the article appears twice, once in a dedicated page (article page) and once with other articles (in the archive).
Is there a specific SEO approach to this type of situation? Is there duplicate content?
What page name should I give each archive (if at all), as there are quite a few?
Thank you
-
Thank you Egol.
Your insights were very helpful.
David
-
I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.
I use the title and about 20 words. I use WordPress where that is possible.
For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.
I would try to use the first 20 words or first sentence if possible. If not possible I would move to a different content manager.
Just my two cents.
-
Thank you Egol,
I believe that when you mention indexing category pages and index pages you refer to titles only.
For now, the CMS is indexing each entire article in the monthly archive page. Which can create quite long pages as articles are not truncated.
-
I believe that Google is smart enough to know that millions of blogs have article pages, category pages and archive pages.
If your blog posts are unique content of substantive length and you only include a snippet on the category and archive pages then it is unlikely that you will suffer a duplicate content problem.
If you do have a duplicate content problem it will more likely come from scrappers grabbing your content or republishing your feed (that has full post content).
My approach is to allow indexing of article pages, category pages and index page but block only the pagination of the index and category pages.
If I blocked indexing of category or article pages I would lose thousands of visitors per day.
-
Thanks a lot Jeffrey,
Very helpful!
David
-
I'd leave it as "follow" since there's no reason to make it "nofollow" in this case. I believe that's what Yoast recommends via the plugin as well.
-
Thank you for your input, it is helpful.
Do you think I should simply do "noindex" or should I also say "follow" or "nofollow"?
Thanks
-
I would add a "noindex" tags to the archive pages and leave the article page alone. If it's the same archive setup I'm thinking of, there's little value to leaving this in the Google index so that's it's searchable.
Are you using WordPress? This can be easily done with the Yoast SEO plugin.
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
-
Getting the SEO right for blog on different server
Hi There This must be a common scenario but there's very little help on it. Right now I have: www.domain.com hosted on a Windows dedicated server. I have blog.domain.com hosted on a separate hosted Wordpress server and I use an A Record at the DNS level to make sure the sub domain works. Easy peasy! However we want to move our blog so its at www.domain.com/blog as we're definitely seeing an issue with the sub domain hosting of the blog in terms of SEO. My problem is that I cannot install WP onto the windows server, its' just not feasible as too much is going on with it, so i can;t simply redirect my blog.subdomain.com to www.domain.com/blog as it won't exist. How do I do this and maintain the SEO/link juice? Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Raptor-crew0 -
Reverse proxy a successful blog from subdomain to subfolder?
I have an ecommerce site that we'll call confusedseo.com. I created a WordPress blog and CNAME'd it to blog.confusedseo.com. Since then, the blog has earned a PageRank of 3 and a decent amount of organic traffic. I am considering a reverse proxy to forward blog.confusedseo.com to confusedseo.com/blog/. As I understand it, this will greatly help the "link juice" of the root domain. However, I'm concerned about any potential harm done to the existing SEO value of the blog. What, if anything, should I be doing to ensure that the reverse proxy doesn't hurt my "juice" rather than help it?
Technical SEO | | bedbugsupply0 -
Time to deindexing: WMT Request vs. Server not found
Google indexed some subdomains (13!) that were never supposed to exist, but apparently returned a 200 code when Google somehow crawled them. I can get these subdomains to return a "server not found" error by turning off wildcard subdomains at my DNS. I've been told that these subdomains will be deindexed just from this server not found error. I was going to use Webmaster Tools and verify each domain, but I'm on an economy goDaddy server and apparently subdomains just get forwarded to a directory, so subdomain.domain.com gets redirected to domain.com/subdomain. I'm not even sure with this being the case, if I can get WMT to recognize and remove these subdomains like that. Should I fret about this, or will the "server not found" message get Google to remove these soon enough?
Technical SEO | | erin_soc0 -
Facebook likes for a blog - are posts or root domain more important?
I've just added the facebook plugin for my wordpress blog. I've activated the like buttons on each post and I share the posts on facebook - so when someone likes it on facebook, it reflects on the blog post. In my blog sidebar I've added the Like widget. I can either put the URL for it as my blog root domain (not many likes yet) or my facebook page (lots of likes, so more impressive) I've been hearing about Likes etc counting towards SEO, so I'm wondering if anyone can tell me whether developing Likes for my blog root domain will have any significant benefit over the Likes I am getting for the individual posts?
Technical SEO | | AISFM0 -
HTACCESS redirect vs. forwarding
I'm having trouble using htaccess redirect to redirect a subdomain to a new domain on a different server. Tech support at godaddy suggested I forward the subdomain. The subdomain has already been cached by google. Will forwarding in this way have the same affect (SEO wise) as an htaccess redirect??
Technical SEO | | triple90 -
Should I add my blog posts to my sitemap.txt file?
This seems like it should be an obvious no, just because of the amount of work that would entail, and then remembering to do it every time I make a post, but since I couldn't find anything on Google about it and have never heard anyone mention it, I figured I'd ask.
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Singular vs plural in urls
In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.? I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | AmericanOutlets0 -
Permanent 301 redirects vs canonical urls?
Im moving a website that was .php to wordpress with a few static HTML pages. Which is better use permanent 301 redirects and delte the old pages, leave the old pages and use canonical urls and 301 redirects or something else?
Technical SEO | | senith0