Should I noindex WooCommerce subcategories?
-
What's the best practice these days for handling indexing of WooCommerce product subcategories?
Example: in the sitemap we have:
/product-category-a/
/product-category-a/subcategory-1/
/product-category-a/subcategory-2/
etc.Should the /subcategory-*/ be noindexed, canonical to parent, or stay as indexed?
Thanks!
-
I agree with effect and Joe
Even tough search engines don't understand the actual content (as far as we can tell :P). As a rule of thumb you can always ask yourself the question if your content adds useful information for your visitor. Subcategories contain extra information about the products and can help visitors find the product they are looking for faster. So I would definitely keep them in.
-
I agree with effectdigital, keep them in.
-
I'd say leave them indexed unless you notice related performance issues
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
-
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
Should I noindex my categories?
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
When you add 10.000 pages that have no real intention to rank in the SERP, should you: "follow,noindex" or disallow the whole directory through robots? What is your opinion?
I just want a second opinion 🙂 The customer don't want to loose any internal linkvalue by vaporizing link value though a big amount of internal links. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Should I noindex the site search page? It is generating 4% of my organic traffic.
I read about some recommendations to noindex the URL of the site search.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
Checked in analytics that site search URL generated about 4% of my total organic search traffic (<2% of sales). My reasoning is that site search may generate duplicated content issues and may prevent the more relevant product or category pages from showing up instead. Would you noindex this page or not? Any thoughts?0 -
Meta NOINDEX... how long before Google drops dupe pages?
Hi, I have a lot of near dupe content caused by URL params - so I have applied: How long will it take for this to take effect? It's been over a week now, I have done some removal with GWT removal tool, but still no major indexed pages dropped. Any ideas? Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
Hi, Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour. It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place? I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Meta NoIndex tag and Robots Disallow
Hi all, I hope you can spend some time to answer my first of a few questions 🙂 We are running a Magento site - layered/faceted navigation nightmare has created thousands of duplicate URLS! Anyway, during my process to tackle the issue, I disallowed in Robots.txt anything in the querystring that was not a p (allowed this for pagination). After checking some pages in Google, I did a site:www.mydomain.com/specificpage.html and a few duplicates came up along with the original with
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
"There is no information about this page because it is blocked by robots.txt" So I had added in Meta Noindex, follow on all these duplicates also but I guess it wasnt being read because of Robots.txt. So coming to my question. Did robots.txt block access to these pages? If so, were these already in the index and after disallowing it with robots, Googlebot could not read Meta No index? Does Meta Noindex Follow on pages actually help Googlebot decide to remove these pages from index? I thought Robots would stop and prevent indexation? But I've read this:
"Noindex is a funny thing, it actually doesn’t mean “You can’t index this”, it means “You can’t show this in search results”. Robots.txt disallow means “You can’t index this” but it doesn’t mean “You can’t show it in the search results”. I'm a bit confused about how to use these in both preventing duplicate content in the first place and then helping to address dupe content once it's already in the index. Thanks! B0 -
Noindex junk pages with inbound links?
I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem. A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that... and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text... nice number of footprints.) Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page's keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don't want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda's filter. They've got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original...). So I'm thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters. Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I'm considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I'm open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely. What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why? p.s. I'm asking this on my blog (seoroi.com/blog/ ) too, so if you're up for me to quote you (and link to your site, do say so. You aren't guaranteed to be quoted if you answer here, but it's one of the easier ways you'll get a good quality link. p.p.s. Related note: I'm looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for my blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you're interested. You can also PM me here on SEOmoz, though I don't login as frequently.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-Goldenberg0