Should we "no-follow" archives or categories?
-
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?
-
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
-
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
-
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.
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
-
What is the "UPDATE" indicate in the Google Search Console Query Reports?
We recently noticed an update note in the Google Search Console that happened on April 27th. Does this denote an algorithm update? Any feedback or article would really be helpful. Thanks! gfQ8FG9.jpg
Reporting & Analytics | | RosemaryB0 -
Need help with my "ghost" blog...
...when I fired my original web designer, did they sabotage coding? I have never checked my Alexa/Google Analytics, or any blog ranking until last night. Subsequently, I have spent the last 24 hours googling away, and finally joining MOZ b/c I'm desperate to find out WHY I'm not ranking. I've googled and found many answers to a problem directly opposite of mine: (How to increase traffic with a high ranking), but I already have quite a bit of traffic (via Wordpress Stats), but can not be found on any ranking system. So, fiddled with some NoFollow/NoIndex boxes in Genesis SEO settings thinking maybe when my domain name changed it messed everything up? Most the boxes HAD been checked, so I unchecked them all. Anyhow, basically signed up for the monthly service so i could ask this question on the forum. My site is hellowhitney.com **it's so weird---i have a LOT of organic direct hits coming directly to my blog (for instance a celebrity re-posted a post which gained a lot of traffic from Twitter to the page), but Google nor another ranking is seeing it. IN FACT, it stops any and all ranking data back to FEBRUARY 2016 when I changed my domain name from Myscriptedreality.com to HelloWhitney.com Ignorance is NOT bliss in this case--would appreciate any help! #ForeverGrateful
Reporting & Analytics | | hellowhitney0 -
Does "not provided" affect the referral traffic data?
There is a discrepancy between what an referring site is showing as clicks back to my site versus what Google Analytics is showing. For example - They are stating that their site sent 100 clicks to my site. The GA data shows 25 referred clicks from that site. Could this be due to the "not provided" that hides most of the keyword data?
Reporting & Analytics | | devonkrusich0 -
Moz is showing different "errors" than Webmaster tools
I have set up my Moz campaign and the crawl errors are showing multiple duplicate content and page titles however when I check my webmaster tools data, these errors are not showing up. Is this normal and who should I listen to?
Reporting & Analytics | | LabelMedia0 -
Google Analytics VS target="_blank" internal links: How much wrong is it?
I am working on an e-commerce website, and our CEO is sure that having target="_blank" in internal search result is boosting the conversion (not sure, but it's not an issue at the moment). The problem is that Google Analytics sees all URLs visited from search results as entrances/direct visits, hence the Booking Funnel Tracking does not work as it was supposed to. Is there any way to recover the tracking? Or we shall get the rid of target="_blank" attribute?
Reporting & Analytics | | apartmentGin0 -
Can't seem to rank for keyword "home care grand rapids" - need some advice
I am trying to rank for "home care grand rapids" and am having a really difficult time. My site: http://healthcareassociates.net has better backlinks, keywords and other seo markers than my competitors but I still can't seem to rank. The keyword and associated keywords (home care grand rapids michigan, home health care grand rapids, etc.) are only 31-33% difficulty and my site/page rank is better than the leading sites. What gives? Todd
Reporting & Analytics | | t1kuslik0 -
Yikes..what is this? "We have detected that the root domain xxxxxx.com does not repsond to web requests"!!!
Can anyone tell me what this means? "We have detected that the root domain xxxxxx.com does not repsond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information"
Reporting & Analytics | | MannixSEO0 -
AXIS plugin & SSL Search providing "not provided" results
Hi, Does anyone know if the Axis plugin by Yahoo will generate the infamous "not provided" results in reporting? Or is it dependent on what browser the plugin is used on? Thank you Bonnie
Reporting & Analytics | | DeluxeCorp0