Should I noindex my categories?

[angelamaemae]

Hello! I have created a directory website with a pretty active blog. I probably messed this up, but I pretty much have categories (for my blog) and custom taxonomy (for different categories of services) that are very similar. For example I have the blog category "anxiety therapists" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety".

1- is this a problem for google? Can it tell the difference between archive pages in these different categories even though the names are similar?

2- should I noindex my blog categories since the main purpose of my site is to help people find therapists ie my custom taxonomy?

[angelamaemae]

Kind of exiting though. Everytime google picks up on a couple of URLs my rankings shoot up. Its exciting to see ^_^

[angelamaemae]

That was part of my apprehension about deindexing my blog categories. They are ranking right now.....but I also pulled a dumb move and set all of my listing categories as noindex in Yoast a couple of months ago. Fixed this a month ago but still waiting on google to pick up on it. That's part of why I'm not sure about all of this. Not sure if things will change when google starts noticing my listing categories.

[angelamaemae]

"insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which"

I've currently got it set up so that blog posts are
/category/anxiety
and listings are under
/listing-category/anxiety

Would you say this is sufficient to indicate to google that these two are different?

[212dijital]

If you have get organic traffic on categories you can index them. İf you dont get any traffic with categories on Serp dont use.

[effectdigital]

It's unlikely that if two pages are both very useful for a query, that Google would de-list one purely because it's from the same domain. If neither page is very high value in terms of content or popularity, what you are suggesting can happen. But instead of taking the 'easy' way out and de-indexing one, your end goal should be to make every page as useful as possible!

You will rarely ever benefit in the SERPs by doing a 'quick easy thing' which adds no value to your site, pages or the wider web. Always ask how you could be informing, educating or entertaining the web in a fresh new way which hasn't previously been done. If you're doing what has been done before, you need to do it at least 3-4x better to steal that audience and exceed the historic popularity of other information sources

If your categories really all are on the same level you might want to address that by having architectural (URL) layers to distinguish the categories. Whenever you say to yourself "I can't do better", that is a big problem as not all of your competitors will share that some mindset. Do you want to be the one who gets ahead? Then you need to push on!

insead of having "/anxiety" and also "/anxiety-counseling" on the same level, why not have "/conditions/anxiety" and also "/practitioners/anxiety" as well? That way the URLs are different but there's also a hierarchical structure which helps Google to work out which is which

I think you're right that your blogs may contain content that is more relevant to the queries which you have specified. That being said, de-indexing them doesn't magically make your commercial pages more relevant. It's not necessarily going to make your commercial pages rank better, or at all. As such - maybe doing heavier CRO on the non-commercial pages would be the most advisable solution!

If you ever find yourself thinking "aha I can do this quick clever thing to make Google do what I want instead of putting their users first" it's almost certainly the wrong tactic

[angelamaemae]

Awesome! thank you for your response ^_^. I'm not so concerned about getting one to rank over the other as much as I'm concerned that having one will cause the other not to rank at all or be significantly dampened.

2 problems lol

1. I really couldn't come up with a good category structure, so I have 30-40 categories all on the same level. Its a therapist directory so all of the categories in question are pretty much diagnoses/therapeutic issues. I don't think I could create any better hierarchy....is that really bad?

2. I did something weird :-p. my blog categories are pretty much duplicates of my custom taxonomy but with "therapy" or "counseling" tagged on the end....I think it would be better to have my custom taxonomy set up this way because its about therapists and counselors, whereas my blog is about the subject in question....but my theme is set up in a way that would have made that look bad, resulting in long lists like this:
   anxiety counseling
   depression counseling
   couples counseling
   etc.

Do you think this is a problem? Should I go through all of the coding work to change it or would something like this make little difference to google? Ie if someone searches for anxiety therapy would the blog archive "anxiety therapy" be more likely to come up than the archive of actual therapists who work with anxiety called "anxiety" because the names suggest the blogs are more relevant to the search query?

[effectdigital]

This is an interesting question and I can see why, with many modern agencies focusing on 'keyword cannibalisation' you would consider this action. What you have to realise is that Google still largely sees the web as a mass of interconnected pages. If your blog categories supply decent enough content to rank for those related terms, there's no guarantee that if you turn them off - Google will make the same evaluation of your business-aimed (service-level) categories instead

That being the case, I'd actually let time and data lead the way. In Google Analytics you will probably find that some service-level categories gain more traffic, whilst for some categories their contextual blog iterations bring in more

You might consider learning more about CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). In my opinion, there's rarely a time where turning traffic off is beneficial. But could those blog category URLs be re-designed to point users more easily (and more often) to their commercial counterparts? Probably

I do tend to no-index 'tag' URLs as they are messy and non-hierarchical, they can fudge up your equity flow from A to B. But actual categories with a hierarchical structure? Those are pages which you do want to rank

You might also consider whether there's some clever way to just have one category which lists posts and also commercial offerings on a given thematic basis. Really, architectural unification should be your end goal!

Remember: there's absolutely no guarantee that de-listing one category type would cause the other to rank. They're very different pages with contextually different content. Keep an eye on both and strategize to one day, eventually bring them together. That's what I would do!