I have several wordpress blogs and I utilize a highly recommended SEO plug-in. It gives you these choices: Use noindex for Categories: Check this for excluding category pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content. Use noindex for Archives: Check this for excluding archive pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content. Use noindex for Tag Archives: Check this for excluding tag pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content. What do you recommend for these choices? I had someone recently tell me to: Use Noindex for META Keywords Use Noindex for categories Allow index of Archives Do you agree? I have just noticed most of my categories have no PR even when the home page has PR5. Is this a concern?
The reason they recommend using noindex for all three is because each of those contain the same content. Lets say you have a total of 10 articles. All 10 have appeared on the home page before, so you know they are indexed by Google, since the spider has crawled the front page. They also are found in archives, the categories, and the tag archives. Why would Google need to crawl those sections again to find the same content it has already indexed? Some people need different settings if they use a static blog, which only displays static (doesnt update) content on their front page. Since their articles go directly into the categories and archives instead of appearing on the front page, it might be helpful to those people to allow Google to index one section, such as the categories. The rule of thumb: Make sure a spider can index your content. If you have a blog which every post appears on the main page, use noindex on all of those sections. That way you avoid having duplicate content. If you have a static blog, use just one section for indexing. That way a spider can find your content since it isnt on the main page. To answer your second question, if you are not allowing Google to index your categories, do you really expect PR on them? It is not a concern at all. Since I am assuming you have an updating blog, leave all settings at noindex.
Very good - thank you. Until recently though, on one of my blogs I had it indexing the categories as well as the home page. The site has a PR5 and several of the categories have PR3 and 4. This PR thing drives me nuts. All I really care about is SERPS An added after thought: since we are telling the spiders to NOT index the categories how does this effect our incoming links to specific category index pages and the individual posts therein?
Well I am not an expert in SEO and I will not pretend to be, so I might not be the best answer for all your questions but I will put in my thoughts. The PR of your categories doesnt really matter, its only a number. The SERP's of your site are what really matter, as you said. So I would suggest doing a little experiment, where you first try to index the categories and then noindex them. See which setting affects your SERP's or if they do at all. If it does not affect your rankings but increased the PR of the category pages, I would say let spiders index your categories, just so you can have the PR on those pages. As for your added thought, the only content on a category page are your posts, that have already been indexed unless you have a static website. Incoming links for the category pages themselves are the reason you have PR on those pages. If the spiders index your categories they are indexing duplicate content. From what I have read, duplicate content is no good, but I am not sure. If someone could give us the facts on duplicate content that would help a lot. My personal advice to you would be to run the experiment I mentioned above to see if your rankings are affected. I would say noindex on the categories simply because spiders will be indexing duplicate content. Either way, as long as your rankings stay strong it doesnt really matter at all.
I do have this problems too, I did click index category, archieve and tag before I read this post. I never think about duplicate content before. I will remove them now. Oh man, SEO is very complicate!