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  4. Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages

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Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages

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  • Rignite
    Rignite last edited by Oct 8, 2014, 10:10 PM

    Hi there,

    Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs?

    The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content.  And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term.

    Just curious what others think.

    Thanks!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • DennisSeymour
      DennisSeymour last edited by Oct 10, 2014, 4:53 AM Oct 10, 2014, 4:53 AM

      Noindex tags and your author page (if you only have 1 author)

      For categories, leave it alone, just add a bit of unique content there, much like how ecommerce sites do it.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • Rignite
        Rignite last edited by Oct 9, 2014, 2:34 PM Oct 9, 2014, 2:34 PM

        Thanks everyone so much for your fast and helpful feedback!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Christy-Correll
          Christy-Correll Staff last edited by Nov 4, 2014, 8:13 PM Oct 9, 2014, 1:31 PM

          Hi there! In addition to the responses above, I'd also recommend checking out the Yoast plugin. On a brand new blog, I recommend noindexing the category pages until a good amount of content is built up in each category, including unique content on each category landing page. You may find this post by Dan Shure helpful: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success. Best of luck!

          Christy

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • MoosaHemani
            MoosaHemani Banned last edited by Oct 9, 2014, 12:29 AM Oct 9, 2014, 12:29 AM

            I believe this depends from case to case. On my own blog I have disabled tags but not categories and this is because I believe few category URL are very much user friendly.

            Before you actually implement anything, ask yourself if this will hurt user experience or not and If the answer is no then just go ahead and do that!

            Hope this helps!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
            • LesleyPaone
              LesleyPaone last edited by Oct 8, 2014, 11:34 PM Oct 8, 2014, 11:34 PM

              I would, personally I have disabled my tag page and author page since there are no tags, and only one author. As for the categories I have them no-indexed.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • gazzerman1
                gazzerman1 last edited by Nov 4, 2014, 8:15 PM Oct 8, 2014, 10:16 PM

                Yes, actually John Muller at Google said this is a wise thing to do.

                First ask yourself is there really any benefit in your users going to any of those pages?

                Duplicate content is not a major issue and can be wildly ignored but many blogs go over the top with tags etc.. Making Google's life harder when trying to make a decision on what content to show for results.

                I personally went as far as removing the front end of wordpress completely and coded a very quick and simple version of the front end myself, so it still gets managed using the wordpress interface like a content management system.

                Works a treat and the response from Google SERPS was great. Also reduces the amount of pages Google needs to crawl over and over to look for changes. This will see Google returning more frequently to the key pages looking for updates.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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