Category pages, should I noindex them?

[lucywrites]

Hi there,

I have a question about my blog that I hope you guys can answer. Should I no index the category and tag pages of my blog? I understand they are considered as duplicate content, but what if I try to work the keyword of that category?

What would you do? I am looking forward to reading your answers

[Mat_C]

Hi,

I am using category pages on my blog, but what to do with a view all page of all the articles?

Example: articles 1-10 are in category A, articles 11-20 in category B and articles 21-30 in category C. But there is also a view all category page with articles 1-30.

Should I 'noindex' this page (although this isn't really duplicate content since the articles per page are not the same as in the separate categories) or can I just let it be indexed?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

I'm Agree with EGOL

Taxonomies: Categories and Tags

Implementing categories and tags on your website is an important way to add structure to it. These taxonomies group content on a certain topic. When used properly, Google will understand the structure of your site better.

Categories have a hierarchical structure. There can be subcategories within categories. Tags do not have a hierarchical structure. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index.

Duplicate content

Duplicate content means that the same content is shown in multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you’ll get the content you came for. But it confuses a search engine: it has to pick which one to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice.

Above that, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, and others link to the second URL. If these duplicates were all linking to the same URL, your chance of ranking in the top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher.

The solution for duplicate content is a so-called canonical link. A canonical link tells the search engines: yes, this content is duplicate, and this one is the original content.

Structure of your website...why? The importance of site structure for SEO
The structure of a website or a blog is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this:

1 - A decent structure makes sure Google ‘understands’ your site.

The way your website is structured will give Google important clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about, and how easily it will find and index the content relevant to your site’s purpose and intent. A good structure could, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

2 - A decent structure makes sure you do not compete with your own content.

On your site, you will probably write multiple pages about similar topics. Let's take an example you have a recipes website and you want to create a structure for your website. So you several recipes on your website and you have several categories such as Italian recipes, French recipes, Mexican recipes and so on. On the other hand, your tags can be used in another approach such as breakfast, dinner, lunch, low cab ect on this way you do not compete with your own content resulting in higher rankings.

[EGOL]

I believe that you can get rid of tags and archives in most situations.  However, good use can often be made of categories, author and pagination.

Let's imagine that you have a website or a blog (there is no difference) about "Widgets".  Every time you find a new widget you photograph it and write a post with substantive content about it.  You are a widget expert and know an awful lot about them.  Widgets are a popular collectable and lots of people are interested in them.  So you start your blog (or website) and publish posts (or pages) about two or three different widgets every week.

You realize that there are different types of widgets based upon what they are made from and everybody knows about this.  Lots of people search for wooden widgets, brass widgets, copper widgets, plastic widgets,etc.  So you make these the categories of your blog (or website) and all of the post about wooden widgets are posted to the "wooden widgets" category page.  Same for "copper widgets" and "brass widgets" etc.

Your post pages display the full size photo and everything that you had to say about that widget.  Your category pages display a small photo of the widget and the first paragraph of your article.  Soon, you have posts about 10 brass widgets, 12 wooden widgets, and 22 plastic widgets and those category pages are starting to look healthy.  They might start ranking for in the SERPs for keywords like "plastic widgets" and "brass widgets" and pull in more traffic than all of your posts combined.

After you have about 20 post showing on a category page you might start using pagination to keep that category page from being enormous.  Then when people read to the bottom they see a link for "earlier posts" and click it.  That takes them to the older posts for this topic and you get more ad impressions.  Now the pagination pages have become valuable.

Your author page might have some bio information about you, noting that you are the president of the Ohio Widget Collecting Society and are a professor of design at a college, where you teach a course on the History of Widgets in America.   You can construct the author page to display your bio and credentials information at the top, your most recent ten posts below that, and your most popular posts below that.  Author pages are valuable because people want to know about you.  Google wants to know about you too because they want to determine if you are a credible author for "widgets".

From experience I can say that category pages can pull in a LOT of traffic, and a REALLY LOT of traffic if you rank well and the topic of your page is heavily searched.  Your author page can help people to decide to link to you, invite you to speak at a convention, ask you to teach a course at a local university, Google might use information from your author page to decide that you deserve better rankings than other authors who post prattle about widgets.  And, your pagination pages can make a lot of extra ad impressions.

So, carefully consider the potential category pages that fit your blog, try to find keywords that are logical fits, optimize those pages to rank for heavily searched queries.  Wordpress gave you lots of options.  Decide how you can use them in a planned way for visitors, searchers, and your own goals.

Good luck.

[elenaglop]

Hola Lucía,

I strongly recommend you to noindex the category and tag pages of your blog. As you say they are considered duplicate content and it is usually very complicated to work that keywords. In fact if I where you I would mark as noindex the following: categories, tags, author, archives and even the pagination of the blog.

I hope this helps!