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Right having a major seo revamp on my blog currently and just wondering how everyone has their tags and categories setup, tried doing some research online and 50% so its best to index and 50% so its best to no index.
Currently I have my tags and categories indexed and most rank quite well in google (instead of any posts) so its better to keep it as it is?
While we are on the subject of rank, how important is the mozrank? I’m guessing it’s just another factor that influences how you rank in google, but doesnt mean site a with a higher rank will rank higher than site b.
The plan is to write custom meta descriptions for all my cats and tags but before I start that mammoth task I just want to make sure I’m going about it the right way. This will also remove any duplicate content issues for the cats and tags.
James
You might find this interesting, Google denies the ‘duplicate content’ penalty: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
I have “noindex, follow” on everything beyond page 1 on tags and categories. I don’t want to present Google (or Bing) with multiple pages with the same theme. One theme = one page is my rule of thumb.
May I ask how you have done this, Dont really want an all singing and dancing seo plugin as my theme seo does most things, but doesnt allow for me to noindex,follow the second pages for tags and categories, its either noindex all or index all.
Did you use a plugin?
I use Yoast social plugin, you can do it with that
cheers mate
I looked into this for tags and cats a little while ago and you’re right about the confusing message, it really is pretty much 50/50.
But, if you check out some of the best ranked blogs out there most seem to have tag and cat pages indexed, meaning they’ve chosen that option. I think it’s okay to do as long as you at least try to make them unique in some way.
I came to the conclusion that it would probably be a benefit to do it if you can spend the time to create unique meta descriptions for them. After all, ecommerce sites do that and suffer no penalty.
I go back and forth on the whole duplicate content issue, but I think it would be wrong to believe that there is no such thing as a penalty for duplicating the same content over and over. Google is about quality of content, so they are basically ignoring their own mandate by claiming that there is no such penalty. I think it’s more likely a matter of semantics, what we call a “penalty” Google calls “content not worth offering”.
@Jay
It’s the eternal question of SEO though, do you or don’t you.
I allow indexing of all categories on GayDemon and most archives but always been in two minds about it. It seems to be ok in my case, maybe because the content is mixed, and not sorted by date.
But logically it would make sense to not index in most cases since they are simply listing of posts or content that’s already listed somewhere else. Specially in the case of blogs where almost all archive pages including categories are sorted by date, meaning they all become quite identical to your home / front page.
@fitmales
For the longest time I just inserted PHP code into my theme. Then I finally wrote my own plugin that will do the same thing (and some other stuff).
@GayDemon
It’s a matter of what pages you want to direct traffic to. I’d rather they go to the first/newest/freshest page for each tag/category, not subsequent/older pages. It’s also a matter of presenting something understandable to googbot and bingbot. “This page is about uncut cocks” makes sense. “Oh, and this one is about uncut cocks, and this other one, and that other one over there, and yeah I guess there are those 5 over there as well…” doesn’t make sense.
Did notice my seo bit of my theme changed as used to have the option to set all subpages of archive pages for the canonical to be to be the first page of the archive, not sure it this is good seo but it worked.
Anyway found a plugin that uses my themes seo as a base (I use genesis) so gone with that one as allows for noindex of subpages of the archive pages.
Hopefully this can reduce my indexed pages, as atm its coming up with far to many, alot are old forums and gallery tho, think where I had all 404 redirect to homepage google presumed that the url was not a 404 so hasnt unindexed them.
Anyway see what happens with the changes ive made over the next few months.
