Should we "no-follow" archives or categories?

[JavaManOne]

I'm reading some reports from my first crawl of 10K pages and I'm wondering if it's wise to mark the archives "no-follow."

I have a WP tool that provides a tool that offers the no follow for categories or archives recommending to choose either one or the other but not both.

What would be the best solution?

[Netboost]

Just use an SEO plugin and canonicalize allt he archives and categories, don't use no-follow as it is a will suck away your pagerank. If you must you could also use the metaname robots and set it to follow, noindex

btw I think Pashmina should win an award for cutest SEO on seomoz

[JavaManOne]

One problem with Wordpress Themes, and not all of them by any means, but they are set up for blogrolls or they list your pages/categories/archives (in my case all three).

With all the posts I have it seems dangerous to change themes at this point as the site may become non-recognizable or I may very well break what isn't necessarily broke.

As far as indexing goes I'm over 90-percent indexed, not bad when you consider the nature of the blog with block quotes that are not original content when added to enrich to full meaning of something I'm blogging about.

Another problem with these designs is you may show any number of posts per pages and Moz is crawling individual posts, pages with multiple posts and actually multiplying the number of posts reflecting duplicate content falsely. I'm also getting "too many links" notices because of the design. But I digress.

In my plugin I simply clicked archives and doubt it will make too much difference. Let's see if anyone else has some input.

Thanks Pashmina

[flowsimple]

You'll probably get some different opinions on this. Your site link architecture and the design of your archive/search/category needs to be assessed to figure out the best solution.

If I had to pick one or the other for the nofollow attribution, I'd pick the Archives over Categories because they have less keyword value. Generally, I'd say no need to use it. Sure, you might say that those pages don't have much value since all they contain is a repetition of content on your other pages. And some may try to use the "nofollow" tag as a way to prevent any link juice from flowing to those pages. But PageRank sculpting using this tactic isn't really effective.

It would be more effective for your SEO to redesign your blog/website sidebar/footer links so that you have "less" links pointing to your Archives and/or categories.