Category pages, should I noindex them?
-
Hi there,
I have a question about my blog that I hope you guys can answer. Should I no index the category and tag pages of my blog? I understand they are considered as duplicate content, but what if I try to work the keyword of that category?
What would you do? I am looking forward to reading your answers
-
Hi,
I am using category pages on my blog, but what to do with a view all page of all the articles?
Example: articles 1-10 are in category A, articles 11-20 in category B and articles 21-30 in category C. But there is also a view all category page with articles 1-30.
Should I 'noindex' this page (although this isn't really duplicate content since the articles per page are not the same as in the separate categories) or can I just let it be indexed?
-
I'm Agree with EGOL
Taxonomies: Categories and Tags
Implementing categories and tags on your website is an important way to add structure to it. These taxonomies group content on a certain topic. When used properly, Google will understand the structure of your site better.
Categories have a hierarchical structure. There can be subcategories within categories. Tags do not have a hierarchical structure. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content means that the same content is shown in multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you’ll get the content you came for. But it confuses a search engine: it has to pick which one to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice.
Above that, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, and others link to the second URL. If these duplicates were all linking to the same URL, your chance of ranking in the top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher.
The solution for duplicate content is a so-called canonical link. A canonical link tells the search engines: yes, this content is duplicate, and this one is the original content.
Structure of your website...why? The importance of site structure for SEO
The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this:1 - A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.
The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good structure could, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.
2 - A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.
On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics. Let's take an example you have a recipes website and you want to create a structure for your website. So you several recipes on your website and you have several categories such as Italian recipes, French recipes, Mexican recipes and so on. On the other hand, your tags can be used in another approach such as breakfast, dinner, lunch, low cab ect on this way you do not compete with your own content resulting in higher rankings.
-
I believe that you can get rid of tags and archives in most situations. However, good use can often be made of categories, author and pagination.
Let's imagine that you have a website or a blog (there is no difference) about "Widgets". Every time you find a new widget you photograph it and write a post with substantive content about it. You are a widget expert and know an awful lot about them. Widgets are a popular collectable and lots of people are interested in them. So you start your blog (or website) and publish posts (or pages) about two or three different widgets every week.
You realize that there are different types of widgets based upon what they are made from and everybody knows about this. Lots of people search for wooden widgets, brass widgets, copper widgets, plastic widgets,etc. So you make these the categories of your blog (or website) and all of the post about wooden widgets are posted to the "wooden widgets" category page. Same for "copper widgets" and "brass widgets" etc.
Your post pages display the full size photo and everything that you had to say about that widget. Your category pages display a small photo of the widget and the first paragraph of your article. Soon, you have posts about 10 brass widgets, 12 wooden widgets, and 22 plastic widgets and those category pages are starting to look healthy. They might start ranking for in the SERPs for keywords like "plastic widgets" and "brass widgets" and pull in more traffic than all of your posts combined.
After you have about 20 post showing on a category page you might start using pagination to keep that category page from being enormous. Then when people read to the bottom they see a link for "earlier posts" and click it. That takes them to the older posts for this topic and you get more ad impressions. Now the pagination pages have become valuable.
Your author page might have some bio information about you, noting that you are the president of the Ohio Widget Collecting Society and are a professor of design at a college, where you teach a course on the History of Widgets in America. You can construct the author page to display your bio and credentials information at the top, your most recent ten posts below that, and your most popular posts below that. Author pages are valuable because people want to know about you. Google wants to know about you too because they want to determine if you are a credible author for "widgets".
From experience I can say that category pages can pull in a LOT of traffic, and a REALLY LOT of traffic if you rank well and the topic of your page is heavily searched. Your author page can help people to decide to link to you, invite you to speak at a convention, ask you to teach a course at a local university, Google might use information from your author page to decide that you deserve better rankings than other authors who post prattle about widgets. And, your pagination pages can make a lot of extra ad impressions.
So, carefully consider the potential category pages that fit your blog, try to find keywords that are logical fits, optimize those pages to rank for heavily searched queries. Wordpress gave you lots of options. Decide how you can use them in a planned way for visitors, searchers, and your own goals.
Good luck.
-
Hola Lucía,
I strongly recommend you to noindex the category and tag pages of your blog. As you say they are considered duplicate content and it is usually very complicated to work that keywords. In fact if I where you I would mark as noindex the following: categories, tags, author, archives and even the pagination of the blog.
I 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
-
Value of using spaces or no spaces on product category page varient keywords
Hello, all fellow Mozzers,
On-Page Optimization | | JamesDavison
I have taken over a project and this account, so can't change the username according to MOZ.🙃 We run an eCommerce website, and to me, some of the content is conflicting as some pages have more information content than what I would put in a commerce page, but this is how the boss wants it to work, personally, I would separate the content out.
The page I'm working on:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/205-70-14.html
and this is an example of the rest of these types of pages, I will be tackling:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/125-15.html I was tasked to improve SEO ranking, when using the MOZ page grader I had a score of 24 out of 27 83% SEO score and 3-page problems. 7th position in Google for the search term 205/70 R14 As it is a generic product listing page, It was pointless to add to the URL and the Internal links I can't reduce as these are links to products, so I went to reduce the
keyword stuffing and making the page content more natural, this improved the page to 25 out of 27, 87% SEO score and 2-page problems. Improvement to 3rd position in Google, but he wants to chase 1st place to be above his competitors, which is fair enough. It turns out that in the past, they have used this type of page to try and get a high ranking for several search terms, as it is a different variation on a tyre size terms are:
205/70 R14, 205/70R14, 205/70 R 14
205/70 X 14, 205/70X14, 205/70 X14
and so on for all the different ways you can search for this tyre size. He is also convinced Google will see these as different search terms, and while I agree to an extent, this causes Keyword Stuffing on the page, which in turn was harming the rankings. Each product listed on the page already has its own title 205/70 R14, 205/70 HR14 and so on, so my question is. What is the best practice for writing content on these types of pages to gain high rankings for several Keywords, and what value does writing the same keyword with spaces and no spaces have? Any help or advice is welcome, so I have a better understanding of how to approach this for this page and the rest of the site. Cheers Mal0 -
Recommended Schema for a Collection/Category page?
Hi There! Taking on a small project up updating and adding in Schema to a clients site; a previous developer half put in data vocabulary. In my planning I was wondering if their would be a best schema type for category page of products - or a collection of products? Any ideas and experience? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | paul-bold0 -
To Many Links On Page
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them. I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products. Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this? Thanks in advance! www.Ocelco.com
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
On page optimisation reports
Hello, How do I configure these reports to check my landing pages, rather than just my home page? Thanks, Bilal
On-Page Optimization | | PLP0 -
Web Page Refresh
Hi there, we redesign our Website, changing it for a jquery based version. This new design is much more usable and nice for our users, however the average page views for user decreased a lot. Basically this is due to the fact that once the user is logged in, it spends most of the time in the same Web form which is updated through jquery without refreshing it. We were thinking about adding a meta refresh tag, or ad some javascript for getting this task done in order to get the relation page views/visitor increased. Do you think refreshing the page every 4 minutes could be penalized by Google (or other Search engines) ? Which should be the interval between refresh ? Would it be better to make it very explicit (i.e. adding a meta refresh tag) or using a kind of hide javascript ? We want to increase the pageviews but of course, we don't want to get penalized
On-Page Optimization | | martincad0 -
Should one page with markers or six separate pages?
Hi - I'm working on a site that was set up with 6 bios on one page, with markers jumping to each person's name. I was thinking about separating those into 6 different pages, but not sure if that's the right thing to do. Advice about keeping the bios on one page vs splitting them up? (Am I more likely to rank for those peoples' names if I have a unique page, or is the one page url with each different marker in it, just as good?) Ranking well for those names isn't a huge goal of the site, but it would be nice to make the choice that would help with that rank. Thanks for your input Emma
On-Page Optimization | | emmas0 -
Page title
So if we have a main category page on our site (mines an ecommerce site), do we go for more than that main keyword phrase for that category of products, or is it better to just keep it by itself, and not utilize the 65-70 characters available?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Canonical home page
I have a site that shows duplicate page content for: www.autoserviceexpertsonline and www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html When looking at the files using the cms (intuit) file manager, I only see the /index.html version. I added the Caononical tag referencing/pointing to both the domain name only and then changed to .../index.html No matter how I code this, the seomoz On-Site SEO Grader still has a problem with it. Is this a bug with the Grading program or am I doing something wrong? Please help as I think this is causing me problems with Google and I'd like to get this right for future sites I will be working on. Thanks, Bill
On-Page Optimization | | Marvo0