I have been mining through old threads about Wordpress and whether one should exclude categories from search engines due to potential issues with duplication. That is: permit them to be indexed or not. I do know that with the supposed "death" of the dreaded "supplemental index" hell at Google, the concerns about duplicate content seem to have diminished somewhat. But based on the recent threads I've read, a lot of really smart SEO folks seem to disagree about whether to exclude category pages in Wordpress (whether via the All In One SEO plugin or via robots.txt) So I'd like to ask all of you if you allow them to be indexed and what your logic is. I note that many very highly trafficked WP blogs ALLOW indexing of category pages. I also have some category pages with respectable PageRank, so I need to consider that as well. Thanks in advance.
Great question. I don't think it is a huge deal, but fixing it is a good idea. Modify your theme to only show excerpts or permalinks, and have entire articles only being shown with single.php. Using a robots.txt file is also a good method: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=815311
Thanks.. i saw that thread. But you refer to "fixing it" when, to some people it's not broken. I saw a few threads where people said that categories should be indexed because they result in a lot of relevant traffic.
Maybe i should just try it for a month or so and see if there's a big difference.. as I said, many of my category pages have respectable PageRank.. not that it matters I guess.
But the plug-in asks you whether you want categories indexed or not. If you uncheck category indexing, it just inserts a noindex tag into the pages. That's at the core of my question - which is preferred? This assumes one is writing unique relevant content and using excerpts and the "more" tag properly. The poll is 50/50 at the moment, heh not helpful.
Well, my blogs' traffic increased by almost double after I put noindex meta tags on category pages and Google re-crawled my blog a couple of times and began indexing properly. I only allow snippets, pages and the full posts to be indexed - using the <!--more--> tag in each post. It's worth a try, what have you to lose?
They've been marked NOINDEX for a year or more...and I'm thinking of changing it to allow their indexing. So I guess I don't have anything to lose, I just wanted to get some feedback since there's so much disagreement.
I allow indexing of category pages - however, I make sure the category pages display only excerpts, and not the complete page. I also forcibly remove the category base (that's /category/ - which comes before the category name, such as www.example.com/category/seo/wordpress-seo-checklist/ for instance, folks) from WordPress as well by editing the rewrite.php file (since Brian Shoff's Category Base Killer plugin is not 2.5.x compatible yet).
Dan. Schulz. has. the. category. answer. :majorlyshockedface: You don't mind making the hacks open source, do you?
You mean this? http://www.brianshoff.com/wordpress/category-base-removal-plugin.htm#comment-2856 (I also use the_excerpt() instead of the_content() in my Theme files).
I don't have the stomach for too much hacking. Mostly because when I upgrade themes, etc. the hacking often disappears and I don't exactly want to deal with code versioning on my site. But thanks for the info Dan. I've not changed anything yet; I mean, I am fairly pleased with how Google treats my site at present. But if adding categories might improve things, I'd do it. Currently some of my category sub-pages have good PR, I don't know how that might play into the equation. For now, I'll probably leave it the way things are (categories = NOINDEX) but I wanted to solicit the input of the experts. Unfortunately as with many things, the experts disagree. thanks again
Just as a follow-up for people who are researching this - I have been including categories for the last few months - allowing them to be indexed. I've dropped 1 in PageRank, despite getting several backlinks from major news sites (a couple of magazines.) I don't know if it's a fluke, or related, or what. But just for your consideration...