Yoast SEO Plugin: To Index or Not to index Categories?
-
Taking a poll out there......In most cases would you want to index or NOT index your category pages using the Yoast SEO plugin?
-
Thanks Dave!
Here are my settings:
Categories - noindex, follow
Tags - noindex, follow
Format - noindex, follow
Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives
Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives
Media - noindex, follow
-
HI Irving,
The Yoast default doesn't have anything checked making everything indexable and their tutorials don't do a very good job at helping people set it up correctly.
It's interesting to know all the differing opinions on what you should have indexed or not indexed.
Here are the settings I have:
Categories - noindex, follow
Tags - noindex, follow
Format - noindex, follow
Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives
Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives
Media - noindex, follow
-
Noindex is the way to go for category pages. I also don't let G index tags and archives.
-
yes noindex,follow category and tag pages. It's the Yoast default setting i believe.
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
-
Entities and SEO
How do you find the correct words (entities) to explain an entity ? The words (entities) that go together within a sentence seem to be based on the specific corpus (the keyword you want to rank ) and when they are million of results it seems impossible to find what word / entity is going to explain the entity / concept I want to explain. It seems that I got a better chance at the lottery 🙂 a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Do you have any advice or software that could parse and find the words that co-occure the most often out of millions of results !! Thank you,0 -
Dealing with negative SEO
Interested to know people strategies for detecting and mitigating negative SEO. Previously I've used link monitoring tool and kept an eye on all new back links coming in to any page on the site. I have then manually assessed each one again using some tools and actually visiting the website. However, this always leaves me with one dilemma. Regardless of my assessment how do search engines see that link? I run three lists a white list, grey list and blacklist. White list - very relevant and have a lot of authority. I.e. leading industry blogs and forums. Grey list - out of topic/industry, directories Blacklist - sites de-indexed by Google, illegal content or absolute spam (i.e. one page filled with hundreds of links to different domains) Do you have any thoughts? How do you assess if link is bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Indexing isolated webpages
Hi all,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tarek_Lel
We are running a classifieds website.Due to technical limitations, we will probably not be able to list or search expired ads, but we still can view ad details view page if you landed on expired ad from external page (or google search results).Our concern is, if the ad page is still exists, but it's totally isolated from the website (i.e not found by search option on the website and no following site links) will google remove it from the index?Thanks, T0 -
How to Index Faster?
Hello, I have a new website and updated fresh content regularly. My indexing status is very slow. When I search how to improve my indexing rate by Google, I found most of the members of Moz community replied there is no certain technique to improve your indexing. Apart from this you should keep posting fresh content more and more and wait for Google Indexing. Some of them asked for submitting sitemap and share posts on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. Well the above comments are from the year of 2012. I'm curious to know is there any new technique or methods are used to improve indexing rate? Need your suggestions! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopLeagueTechnologies0 -
Local SEO tips
Hi! I'm working on http://www.hgsplumbingandheating.co.uk/ at the moment, and it's going pretty well for local terms such as 'Norwich plumber' etc. Has anyone got any tips though on how it can be improved, especially with regard to getting the homepage ranking above the Places listings? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Easy way to change wordpress category titles. Currently categories are appearing with the same title?!
I'm working on a wordpress adult dating review site and have started to set up categories for each of my main keywords. I have also started to add sub categories by county and town and so far have done so for the counties of 'Lincolnshire' and 'Derbyshire'. The problem is though that for each of my subcategories the page titles are appearing the same. For example: www.mysite.com/category/online-dating/lincolnshire/spalding (root category online dating) shows the title as 'Spalding'. www.mysite.com/category/adult-dating/lincolnshire/spalding also has the title 'Spalding' even though it's root category is different (adult dating). It's probably easier to go to http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com to see how it's set up. If you click in the category text in the top menu and navigate to dating/derbyshire/alfreton for example and then adult dating/derbyshire/alfreton you'll notice the page titles are the same. I use all in one SEO pack and have rewrite titles checked with category titles set to %category_title% | %blog_title%. I also use category SEO updater. In order to prevent duplicate content issues how can I simply make the title of each category category root title/category subtitle(county)/category subtitle 2(town). The title of each category page would then read for example Online Dating Lincolnshire Spalding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
To index search results or not?
In its webmaster guidelines, Google says not to index search results " that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." I've noticed several big brands index search results, and am wondering if it is generally OK to index search results with high engagement metrics (high PVPV, time on site, etc). We have an database of content, and it seems one of the best ways to get this content in search engines would be to allow indexing of search results (to capture the long tail) rather than build thousands of static URLs. Have any smaller brands had success with allowing indexing of search results? Any best practices or recommendations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Seo Hosting
Can anyone suggest me some seo hosting providers?But in better price like hostgator?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0