Index or not index Categories
-
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc.
Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct.
Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this.
Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
-
No problem at all, glad I could help!
Good luck with the site!
-
You are really amazing Lewis! I understand what you mean with no indexing the pages 2, 3 etc..Yoast has there such option that I can mark it and it will not be indexing them.
Thank you so much for the tool you gave me to visit yoast site!!! It worked! Now I can learn more about it and figure out what is the best. This is clear that they have blocked ips from Kenya, although they have claimed they do not do that, and we paid almost 100usd for the plugin
Thank you very much Lewis!
-
Hi Iris,
Yes, you want the URLs to be included in the sitemap too as this is what the search engines will use to build a map of your website and list them in their search engines.
With regards to your duplicate page issue, this is to do with your pagination of the pages. There's a guide here which tells you the SEO best practices when it comes to handling pagination, so hopefully this will help - http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
Really, you don't want those additional pages to be picked up in the search engines, so a fix will need to be sorted for that. You'll probably need to find a developer / a plugin to allow you to not index the /2 /3 pages etc.
I don't do much work with Wordpress, so maybe someone else could advise you with regards to the archive section. If your categories and posts are indexed, then I would have thought that you've done the correct thing with the archives and set them to noindex. That being said, I have limited knowledge of carrying out SEO for wordpress so I would need to take a closer look into that to give you a better response..
Hope this helps at least a little!
On a separate note, you could try accessing the Yoast website through a proxy such as http://hidemyass.com/ - Might be worth a go?
-
You are amazing Lewis, thank you so much for your time. The posts in categories are displayed only with short summary, so I guess it should be alright then. Should they also be all included in the sitemap? I am very scared of duplicate content.
Also every category has approximately 3 pages and now the moz crawl shows me that I have duplicate pages like this below and that it does not know which one is canonical:
I am not sure how to sort this out.
I have there also some archive post which says under: "Note: instead of templates these are the actual titles and meta descriptions for these custom post type archive pages."
I set the archives on noindex as i do not want the archives with post shoved in search result, but the categories. I hope this is correct. There are also some options and media, oh my god it's killing me:-( I have no idea what it is.
The reason why I am so annoying with this is that I can't access yoast site, his support team is looking into it why, but did not get back to me yet:-( I guess they have blocked ips from Kenya although they said me they don't do this.
Thank you very much Lewis for all you have done for me already!
-
I'm not sure if I fully understand your question, but I'll give it my best shot to answer it.
If I was in your position, I would set the Yoast plugin to index both the categories and the posts, but make sure that the posts only show a short summary / the first 'x' number of words than the post. The reason behind doing this is similar to how an ecommerce store works.
On eCommerce stores, you have your categories which are used as funnels to find inner product pages. Categories are generally set to be indexed as they combine lots of relevant data for a user which helps create a better user experience. In your case, your category may be 'Villas' and inside that, you may list 20 individual Villas. If you didn't have your category pages indexed, you'd be relying on the search engine to filter a user down to either your homepage or one specific villa which you hope is right for the users choice (which most likely will result in a higher bounce rate).
Again, I'm not sure if I've understood exactly what you're looking for, but that's what I would recommend if you're asking which sections of your site should be indexed. Hope this helps!
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
-
Indexing is live what about rankings ?
I noticed that when I request indexing in the webmaster tool my new content is live within minutes. Does it take longer to update the ranking or is the ranking updated as soon as the new page has been indexed. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Site move-Redirecting and Indexing dynamic pages
I have an interesting problem I would like to pick someone else’s brain. Our business has over 80 different products, each with a dedicated page (specs, gallery, copy etc.) on the main website. Main site itself, is used for presentation purpose only and doesn’t offer a direct path to purchase. A few years ago, to serve a specific customer segment, we have created a site where customers can perform a quick purchase via one of our major strategic partners. Now we are looking to migrate this old legacy service, site and all its pages under the new umbrella (main domain/CMS). Problem #1 Redirects/ relevancy/ SEO equity Ideally, we could simply perform 1:1 - 301 redirect from old legacy product pages to the relevant new site products pages. The problem is that Call to action (buy), some images and in some cases, parts of the copy must be changed to some degree to accommodate this segment. The second problem is in our dev and creative team. There are not enough resources to dedicate for the creation of the new pages so we can perform 1:1 301 redirects. So, the potential decision is to redirect a visitor to the dynamic page URL where parent product page will be used to apply personalization rules and a new page with dynamic content (buy button, different gallery etc.) is displayed to the user (see attached diagram). If we redirect directly to parent URL and then apply personalization rules, URL will stay the same and this is what we are trying to avoid (we must mention in the URL that user is on purchase path, otherwise this redirect and page where the user lands, can be seen as deceptive). Also Dynamic pages will have static URLs and unique page/title tag and meta description. Problem #2 : Indexation/Canonicalization The dynamic page is canonicalized to the parent page and does have nearly identical content/look and feel, but both serve a different purpose and we want both indexed in search. Hope my explanation is clear and someone can chip in. Any input is greatly appreciated! vCm2Dt.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin1 -
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Indexing of internal search results: canonicalization or noindex?
Hi Mozzers, First time poster here, enjoying the site and the tools very much. I'm doing SEO for a fairly big ecommerce brand and an issue regarding internal search results has come up. www.example.com/electronics/iphone/5s/ gives an overview of the the model-specific listings. For certain models there are also color listings, but these are not incorporated in the URL structure. Here's what Rand has to say in Inbound Marketing & SEO: Insights From The Moz Blog Search filters are used to narrow an internal search—it could be price, color, features, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClassicDriver
Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter
URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop?price=1000
The solution here is similar to the preceding one—don’t index the filters. As long as Google
has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good. I believe using a noindex tag is meant here. Let's say you want to point users to an overview of listings for black 5s iphones. The URL is an internal search filter which looks as follows: www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5s?search=black Which you wish to link with the anchor text "black iphone 5s". Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you no-index the black 5s search filters, you lose the equity passed through the link. Whereas if you canonicalize /electronics/apple/iphone/5s you would still leverage the link juice and help you rank for "black iphone 5s". Doesn't it then make more sense to use canonicalization?0 -
To index search results or to not index search results?
What are your feelings about indexing search results? I know big brands can get away with it (yelp, ebay, etc). Apart from UGC, it seems like one of the best ways to capture long tail traffic at scale. If the search results offer valuable / engaging content, would you give it a go?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Site Search Results in Index -- Help
Hi, I made a mistake on my site, long story short, I have a bunch of search results page in the Google index. (I made a navigation page full of common search terms, and made internal links to a respective search results page for each common search term.) Google crawled the site, saw the links and now those search results pages are indexed. I made versions of the indexed search results pages into proper category pages with good URLs and am ready to go live/ replace the pages and links. But, I am a little unsure how to do it /what the effects can be: Will there be duplicate content issues if I just replace the bad, search results links/URLs with the good, category page links/URLs on the navi. page? (is a short term risk worth it?) Should I get the search results pages de-indexed first and then relaunch the navi. page with the correct category URLs? Should I do a robots.txt disallow directive for search results? Should I use Google's URL removal tool to remove those indexed search results pages for a quick fix, or will this cause more harm than good? Time is not the biggest issue, I want to do it right, because those indexed search results pages do attract traffic and the navi. page has been great for usability. Any suggestions would be great. I have been reading a ton on this topic, but maybe someone can give me more specific advice. Thanks in advance, hopefully this all makes sense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IOSC1 -
Google indexing issue?
Hey Guys, After a lot of hard work, we finally fixed the problem on our site that didn't seem to show Meta Descriptions in Google, as well as "noindex, follow" on tags. Here's my question: In our source code, I am seeing both Meta descriptions on pages, and posts, as well as noindex, follow on tag pages, however, they are still showing the old results and tags are also still showing in Google search after about 36 hours. Is it just a matter of time now or is something else wrong?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
From an SEO Standpoint, which is better for my product category URLs?
With our e-commerce store, we can customize the URL for the product categories, so we could have: http://www.storename.com/product-category-keywords/ or http://www.storename.com/product-category-keywords.html From an SEO standpoint (or even from a "trying to get links" standpoint), which would be better to have? I feel like having a *.html category page would be easier for link building, but that's just my personal feelings. Side Note: Our product pages are: http://www.storename.com/product-name.html Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fenderseo0