Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?

[KMack]

I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site.

The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with?

In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type?

Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.

[brightvessel]

Hi all,

I think it is first important to look at your category structure. Use categories as main categories and tags as subcategories. If you have 1 post, in 5 different main categories, you will then be duplicated in some cases the same info. I keep all my posts in one main category which I do index and then all the subcategories as (tags) which I have no-index on. Also, Yoast SEO is my favorite plugin. Just plain easy to use.

[GardenBeet]

with hindsight I should have redesigned the blog pages to convert. The potential spend of the lost traffic was not harnessed

[UplinkSpyder]

Wow, I'm chiming in almost three years later, but I think my question is pertinent. When you stopped indexing your category pages...did sales "happen" on your main website? I ask because you wrote that sales don't happen on your blog. I'm just wondering why sales are not happening on your blog and if it's a matter of funneling or the lack thereof?

[GardenBeet]

my blog category pages began to rank higher for key converting search terms than my main website  - not good - sales dont happen on my blog.

So I stopped the indexing of my category pages....guess what happened?..my website is back to position 1 BUT my blog traffic reduced by half.....so consider EGOL's warning prior to making a decision

[EGOL]

Most of the search engine traffic that enters my blog comes in through category pages.  It would be a huge mistake for me to block them.  However, depending upon the topic area of your site the category pages might have a different importance.

[KMack]

Thank you very much for your answer.

I do have the all in one plugin installed, and my excerpts are not originally written, but taken from the articles so i will leave it no index.

Thanks again!

[Anthony_Trollope]

Hey Kevin,

Welcome to SEOmoz!

Since you are running a Wordpress set-up I would recommend downloading the All-in-one SEO plug-in. It's one of the most popular plugins for Wordpress installs because it helps you with your SEO configuration. Chances are you've probably already got this installed but I figured I would mention it in any case.

As to the no-index configuration of your category and archive pages; I would definitely recommend no-index on the archive pages because otherwise you run the risk of duplicate content, plus you don't really want those archive pages ranking for any of the keywords you are targeting.

For the category pages; if you are giving each post a unique excerpt and thus making the category pages unique in their own right, I would probably take the no-index tag off if only to aid link juice flow between categories and individual posts. If on the other hand you are not writing a unique excerpt for each post and instead showing the whole post or a modified version of the original, you run the risk of duplicating your content and this will greatly impact your ability to rank for the terms you are trying to target. In this case, keep the setup as it is.

Hope these points help.

Best,
Anthony