Tags, categories or both?
-
There is so much debate regarding duplicate content, horror stories, losing visitors, being penalized, yada yada... that I am wandering if it's wise to use tags/categories on a WordPress blog.
I saw that all major blogs are using these structuring etiquettes and they are all dofollow and meta robots on index, follow.
What do you say? It is wise to use tags, categories or both? Should I nofollow them, noindex or follow and index? Or noindex follow?
Cheers and thx.
-
Hey Robert
The best way to think about this is from a user perspective and both categories and tags are useful structures to organise and browse content. So, from a pure user perspective, which is what really matters here, then, yep, use both.
But, you are right in that this can be a problem with WordPress in that it can create so many different taxonomies which are essentially duplicate pages.
If we consider a single user blog you could have
- homepage
- author page
- tags
- categories
- date archives
All of which can be duplicated or substantially duplicated. If you don't use the read more tool as well this can be made worse.
Fortunately, there is a really easy way to deal with this and the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will pretty much do the job for you. Install that and then just noindex all of your non essential landing pages to keep the uniqueness as high as possible.
Again, much of what you do here depends on how you use the categories. Will you have one parent category that has everything in it or lots of parent categories? Are these landing pages? Could you not build your content and build better landing pages if you no indexed them all?
If you have several categories and articles are only going in one category then by all means index them and try to add some unique content to each one beyond the post previews. Maybe use the excerpt on categories and a snippet on the homepage to keep them even more unique.
Plenty of options, no right or wrong answers, just try to keep the site as unique as possible and the above should give you plenty to be going on with.
Shout if you have any questions!
Marcus
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
-
Ecommerce category pages
Hi there, I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I work on a lot of webshops that are made by the same company. I don't like to say this, but not all of their shops perform great SEO-wise. They use a filtering system which occasionally creates hundreds to thousands of category pages. Basically what happens is this: A client that sells fashion has a site (www.client.com). They have 'main categories' like 'Men' 'Women', 'Kids', 'Sale'. So when you click on 'men' in the main navigation, you get www.client.com/men/. Then you can filter on brand, subcategory or color. So you get: www.client.com/men/brand. Basically, the url follows the order in which you filter. So you can also get to 'brand' via 'category': www.client.com/shoes/brand Obviously, this page has the same content as www.client.com/brand/shoes or even /shoes/brand/black and /men/shoes/brand/black if all the brands' shoes happen to be black and mens' shoes. Currently this is fixed by a dynamic canonical system that canonicalizes the brand/category combinations. So there can be 8000 url's on the site, which canonicalize to about 4000 url's. I have a gut feeling that this is still not a good situation for SEO, and I also believe that it would be a lot better to have the filtering system default to a defined order, like /gender/category/brand/color so you don't even need to use these excessive amounts of canonicalization. Because, you can canonicalize the whole bunch, but you'd still offer thousands of useless pages for Google to waste its crawl budget on. Not to mention the time saved when crawling and analysing using Screaming Frog or other audit tools. Any opinions on this matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags
Given that google have stated that duplicate content is not penalised is this really something that will give sufficient benefits for the time involved?Also, reading some of the articles on moz.com they seem very ambivalent about its use – for example http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsWill any page with a canonical link normally NOT be indexed by google?Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Title Attribute for H2 & h3 Tag SEO Question
Hi , We have an eCommerce Site and from looking at a competitor , they seem to be rank better than us even though our everything about our site is better . We hire the same products (are affiliated the same company) so the product list is the same. Both our category pages score A grade in Seomoz reports. So This is what I can deduce from the competitors category page I am trying to compete against. On the cement Mixer hire category page The competitor has put the Main Keyword "Cement mixer hire" in all the Title Attributes on their H2 and H3 tags as well as it being the main H1 tag. They have 5 product links in h3 tags all with the same title attribute (cement mixer hire) These links go through to product page. Am I missing a trick here ?..... I would have though using the title attribute so much for main keyword would be a bit spammy ?. I have copied them with the point 1 but I have not done mine h3 as yet. Just wondering that the SEO guru's thought ?. thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Meta Tag Force Page Refresh - Good or Bad?
I had recently come across a meta tag that could cause a auto refresh on a users browser when implemented. I have been using it for a redesign and was curious if there could be any negative effects for using it, here is the code: All input is appreciated. Ciao, Todd Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichFinnSEO0 -
Wordpress Duplicate Content Due To Allocating Two Post Categories
It looks like google has done a pretty deep crawl of my site and is now showing around 40 duplicate content issues for posts that I have tagged in two seperate categories for example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/latest-news/live-music-boosts-australian-economy http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/live-music-boosts-australian-economy I use the all in one SEO pack and have checked the no index for categories, archive, and tag archive boxes so google shouldn't even crawl this content should it? . I guess the obvious answer is to only put each post in one category but I shouldn't have to should I? Some posts are relevant in more than once category.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Shortening Keywords in a title tag
in my title tag i want to have: 3D Renders of Office Refurbishment & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group which unfortunatly is longer than 70 characters, however, to make it fit in 70 characters i could put: 3D Renders of Office Refurb & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group Notice that refurbishment has been changed to refurb, would this be ok for SEO purposes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompleteOffice0 -
Organising Blog categories for SEO and usability.
Hello! I'm a professional photographer and have used categories in an old blog to separate my work. (weddings, portraits, etc.) I'm starting an new blog and everything was imported, except categories so as i started rewriting them, I noticed the 'personalised URL. So I was thinking of re-writing my categories based on types of jobs and location. For example: *North Wales -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography *Cheshire -wedding photography -portrait photography -commercial photography and so on... Or do you think it's best to just have shoot style categories? What do you guys think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0