What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?
-
I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great.
I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following:
- Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow
- Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post.
My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page.
My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself.
Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed?
The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).
-
Thank you for your update!
I agree with your tests and your solution is probably the best also from a user experience point of view: giving a nice description and useful links on category pages should improve the number of pageviews / time spent on site.
-
Thanks for replying and giving us a status update. It's always great to know what happens with the advice so we can all learn. Glad to hear you're getting such good results!
-
For anyone that's interested in results, I've taken my blog that had everything nonindex, follow (categories and tags) and set categories to index, follow and tags to noindex, follow. I've seen about a 20% increase in traffic (not all due to this), my category pages are indexed and cached, and they're being used as entrance pages in some cases. Note that I did add good descriptions for these and I'm displaying them on the category page.
I also took another blog that had everything index, follow and changed it to the same that I just described. They have seen a reduction in their bounce rate and an increase in traffic.
On the same subject, I've also changed my paginated pages (archive pages 2+) to noindex, follow. They pretty much look the same as page 1 and they're pretty low quality landing pages. I've just added it but I noticed many recommendations to do it, Yoast.com does, and I see it on other big sites.
-
I think you may have hit on some key points here that kind of work into my initial thoughts:
- Amount of high quality content
- Highly organized category/tag structure
I believe that if you have these two key attributes for your site, having your categories and tags indexed would be very useful. In myself and the clients that I work with, I feel like the categories have plenty of high quality content but the tags are hit or miss.
From hearing the discussions of others and my own experience, I feel like having the categories indexed and the tags noindex would work out well but I think it's worth a shot to index my tags and see what happens. I'm sure Google and SEOmoz will let me know if I have some big dupliate content issues and I can easily monitor the traffic to these pages.
The interesting statistic for the tag pages will be the bounce rate...
-
Ryan, I have to say that you do bring a great point here and kudos to you on that. I think I may have jumped the gun a little bit in my initial response without considering the exact situation.
If you look at site like Compendium, along with Smashing Magazine and Noupe, they use this same method. Although, they a lot of high quality content, get tons of traffic and their category and tag structure are highly organized. This does work well, but from my experience, if you don't have all of those keys in place then you won't rank well for those categories in search results. On the other hand, here at SEOmoz, they do not have their tags and categories indexed, but they have the organization, traffic and content. Although, the only difference is that SEOmoz isn't using URL friendly slugs for these categories...
Maybe the better suggestion to Jared should be, try it both ways. Use noindex, follow at first for a month or so, then switch to indexing them. Test each method and see what results you get for your blog. It won't hurt your site in any way. I would just suggest that if you are going to index categories that you make sure you have thought through your level of organization.
-
I really wonder about this assumption that Google will ding a blog for duplicate content based on category and tag pages. As Jared pointed out typically those pages only show snippets. I don't know one way or the other, but I'm inclined to think Google is smart enough not to respond with a penalty. TKIG and Dan, I'm not disagreeing with you because I have no data to support one opinion or the other, but I'm very curious what you are basing your opinions on. FYI, this approach is nearly identical to the strategy Compendium uses to generate long tail search landing pages and they claim to have no duplicate content issues.
-
The Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast doesn't no index both by default and I would give him more authority on SEO than the all in one SEO pack. Maybe it's a "depends on the situation"?
I guess it sounds like noindex, follow tag pages there is a consensus but I'm surprised at everyone saying noindex, follow on the category pages. With providing a category description and only displaying an excerpt from the posts, I feel like you have a good page that should be indexed.
I guess that brings up a good question on the measure of duplicate content. Is seomoz pro crawler a good enough measure of duplicate content or is Google super sensitive?
-
The all in one seo pack plugin for wordpress automatically sets your category and tags pages to noindex, so that's a good clue right there. I never indesx them for duplicate content issues. I also don't index the date archives either. Of course I never link to them either or really use categories or tags, so it's never been much of an issue for me.
-
Tags and categories in Wordpress should always be set to noindex, follow. Why? Usually by allowing the search engines to index WordPress tags and categories you create duplicate content. If you have a lot of tags and categories you also create a numerous amount of non-signifcant search results for your domain.
EDIT: You are not hindering search results for potential visitors by not indexing your tags and categories. You are simply keeping them from being cached and indexed in search results. For SEO purposes it is much better to noindex, follow these pages.
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
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Best practice to handle Wordpress Categories/Tags
Hello Mozzers, I am sure a lot of people here are using wordpress. How do you handle Categories & Tags? I came across that they produce a lot of duplicate content in the google index. My website is brand new so I don't have any traffic yet, how would you handle it? noindex, follow? Or block /categories/ and /tags/ from robots.txt? Probably I am completely wrong with both ways? I am grateful for your answers! Best regards!
Technical SEO | | grobro0 -
Who uses WordPress Tags anymore?
Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags. I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay2 -
Are nofollow, noindex meta tags healthy for this particular situation?
Hi mozzers, I am conducting an audit for a client and found over 200 instances using meta tags(nofollow, noindex). These were implemented essentially on Blog pages/category pages, tags not blog posts which is a good sign. I believe that tagged URLs aren't something to worry about since these create tons of duplicates. In regards to the category page, i feel that it falls in the same basket as tags but I am not positive about it. Can someone tell me if these are fine to have noindex, nofollow? Also on the website subnav which are related to the category pages mentioned prev, the webmaster have implemented noindex,follow(screenshot below), which seems ok to me? am i right? Thanks 8egLLbo.png?1
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Best way to implement noindex tags on archived blogs
Hi, I have approximately 100 old blogs that I believe are of interest to web browsers that I'd potentially like to noindex due to the fact that they may be viewed poorly by Google, but I'd like to keep on our website. A lot of the content in the blogs is similar to one another (as we blog about the same topics quite often), which is why I believe it may be in our interests to noindex older blogs that we have newer content for on more recent blogs. Firstly does that sound like a good idea? Secondly, can I use Google Tag Manager to implement noindex tags on specific blog pages? It's a hassle to get the webmaster to add in the code, and I've found no mention of whether you can implement such tags on Tag Manager on the usual SEO blogs. Or is there a better way to implement noindex tags en masse? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | TheCarnage0 -
Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?
So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog. (our own domain not a wordpress.com) the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool. It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees. This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not) My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog. Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this? I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site). Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.
Technical SEO | | SCFederal0 -
Help needed with robots.txt regarding wordpress!
Here is my robots.txt from google webmaster tools. These are the pages that are being blocked and I am not sure which of these to get rid of in order to unblock blog posts from being searched. http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?cat=743 http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=240 These category pages and blog posts are blocked so do I delete the /? ...I am new to SEO and web development so I am not sure why the developer of this robots.txt file would block pages and posts in wordpress. It seems to me like that is the reason why someone has a blog so it can be searched and get more exposure for SEO purposes. IS there a reason I should block any pages contained in wodrpress? Sitemap: http://www.ensobottles.com/blog/sitemap.xml User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*/trackback Disallow: /*/feed Disallow: /*/comments Disallow: /? Disallow: /*? Disallow: /page/
Technical SEO | | ENSO
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /commentsDisallow: /feed0 -
Subdomains at Yola, Blogger, Wordpress
If the purpose of constructing a site or blog is for SEO ie a linking microsite, is it better to keep as a subdomain or to register on its own domain. The question is how much of the Domain Authority of that site will flow through the subdomain to linked site. I note that these subdomains have PA of 1, does this answer my own question?? Thanks eg widgets.yolasite.com or widgets.wordpress.com
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0