I am aware of with the functionality of (Index, No Index, Follow, No Follow) and robots.txt (Allow, Disallow) Wordpress thingy is new to me, i was using joomla before. I am asking in terms of better SEO, I also know that having your Post Titles, Categories and Tags (Index) will be negative due to duplicate linking. What is the best practice to Index your links. My current configuration is. 1) Post Titles (Index, Follow) 2) Page Titles (Index, Follow) 2) Categories (No Index, Follow) 3) Tags (NoIndex, Follow) This will only index my post titles in google search results, so please tell me if i am on the right path or not ?
The reason why most of SEO plugins out there recommend noindex for categories and tags pages is because, these pages "might" generate duplicate content within your own sites. These mostly occurred to themes which created but not considering the aspect of uniqueness of the category/tags pages. For some wordpress themes, your homepage loop and your archival pages loop are usually using the same layouting which display the same post loop. This is not a good practice in seo. 1. Here's the simple example #1 - to describe it: - You have a blog with 1 category only (as you haven't created any other categories - say Uncategorized). And you have 20 posts already. - All your posts are automatically assigned to this Uncategorized category each time you've created a new post - even if you're not assigning it. So you have all of your posts assigned to one category. -> The bad result from this situation when you're not using a theme that's differentiate the display of archival pages is : Your homepage loop will be having exactly the same content as the Uncategorized loop. - Your homepage has the same 20 posts - Your Uncategorized loop has the same 20 posts as in your homepage. -> THAT's a dupe. 2. Example #2, - Say you have a post about webmaster - let's give it a title : Webmaster Tips 101 . You add 5 tags for this post, eg : webmaster, webmaster news, webmasters, web master -> The bad result from this situation when you're not using a theme that's differentiate the display of archival pages is : All of those 5 tag pages above, will be having the same content, which is the Webmaster Tips 101 post. -> THOSE are another dupes. ....that's why almost all seo plugins suggest and recommend to noindex archival pages (categories/tags and others) IF, you want your categories and tags pages to be indexed as well by the search engine, then you 'll gonna need to make sure that these pages dont display the same content - by using a theme which is crafted and supported these kind of need. hope it helps.
My friend if i noindex my categories pages and also i'm not showing my categories on any page, now the question is, there're lot of posts which will have no link to browse because the categories they exist in are not being displayed anywhere on the site. What would you say about this issue? please note i have 30 categories but only 4 displayed.