I am creating a Wordpress site that relies heavily on category archives to show relevant excerpts. The point of the site is for people to find audio tracks they can licence. Each track has a page with audio file and info. They can either search on the site by keyword or else go to a category menu (which could be a genre, era or a mood). The thing is a track could have three or for possible categories, so the category archives may have a lot of duplicate content. For example a slow blues track might be in all of these categories: blues, 40s, slow, sad, sleazy. There could be about fifty categories, plus a category that everything is in My question is do I index or noindex each category archive?
I think you should remain index for all categories, people may come to your website by searching these categories on Google. However, I have a little bit confuse about your categories, why don't you use tags instead of categories in your example "categories: blues, 40s, slow, sad, sleazy.". I think you should restructure and classify which parts are for categories and which are just for tags. I hope this help.
I'm not sue tags would work, canyou show a page of tag excerpts like you can with a category archive?