Why is everyone saying that archives should not be indexed? For example, I have certain categories that are not displayed on the homepage, on my blog. For these, I created category pages and added them to the blog's main menu. However, are they now displayed as archives? That's what it says at the top. If I stop archives from being indexed, then these unique pages won't get indexed either.. I'm confused as to what parts of the website are considered as archives in WP 2.3.1. If you want to see what I'm talking about, here's a page: http://www.hannahmontanazone.com/Funky
If you place some links in your current blogs to point to the archived blog entries on the home page or other pages, search engine spiders should be able to follow those links and index these pages. You may want to tweak your site's navigation structure so that these archived entries can be followed and crawled by search engine spiders.
The problem with archives is that they are too similar to other pages on your site (for instance pages organized by keywords). It creates a duplicate content issue. Since it is more likely that people are looking for the subjects than for the year you published something in - it's better to have the keyword-pages indexed and not the pages where your blog-entries are organised by publication date.