Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
-
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!
-
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.
-
Thanks everyone so much for your fast and helpful feedback!
-
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
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
Technical SEO | | IstoresincThe title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top? I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this. I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO. NIck
0 -
How much domain authority is passed on through a link from a page with low authority?
Hello, Let's say that there is a link to site A from site B. The domain authority of site B is 85, but the link is on a page that has a page authority of only 1. Does much authority get passed along from site B to site A? (Let's assume site A has a domain authority of 35, if that's relevant.) Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
What's the correct SEO for a Gallery?
Hi there, I was wondering if anyone was an expert on galleries and using canonical URL's? URL: http://www.tecsew.com/gallery In short I'm doing SEO for a site and it has a large gallery (3000+ images) where each specific image has it's own page and each category (there's 200+) also has its own page. Now, what I'm thinking is that this should be reduced and asking Google to index/rank each page is wrong (I also think this because the quality of the pages are relatively low i.e little text & content etc) Therefore, what should be suggested/done to the gallery? Should just the main gallery categories get indexed (i.e http://www.tecsew.com/3d-cad-showcase)? Or should I continue to allow Google to trawl through all of it? Or should canonical URL's be used? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best Wishes, Charlie S
Technical SEO | | media.street0 -
Fowarding URL's Have No SEO Value?
Good Morning from -3 Degrees C no paths gritted wetherby UK 😞 Imagine this scenario. http://www.barrettsteel.com/ has been optimised for "Steel suppliers" & "Steel stockholders". After runnning an on page SEO moz report its recommended that the target terms should be placed in the url eg www.steel-suppliers.co.uk Now the organisation will not change the url but think setting up a forwarding url eg registering www.steel-suppliers.co.uk to then forward to www.steel-suppliers.co.uk will be of benfit from an SEO perspective. But i think not. So my question is please "is a forwarding url of no value but a permanent URL (struggling for the terminology to describe the url a site is set up with) such as www.steel-suppliers.co.uk would be of value?" Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0