SEO-Should Categories and Tag pages excluded from index?

  • I’m not very experienced in WordPress SEO and I’ve seen plugis that offers to exclude Cat, tags and author pages from being indexed by the search engines. My question is: should these pages be excluded (and why) or not? I think these pages have a lot of information on them and you’d like to show it on the serach engines but it seems that they have duplicate content issues…I’d be really glad if you can come up with some answers.

    cheers

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • It’s up to you. If you are truly concerned about SEO, and want to avoid duplicate content that may be a route to take.

    The basic understanding I have is that you want search engines to only find your content using one path. On a default setup your posts exist in multiple locations
    from your index page, from categories, author pages, date archives, tag archives, etc

    That is great for users, to be able to find content many ways. But is confusing for search engines. To find your exact same content by 10 different roads.

    so you want to settle on a main way for search engines to find your content and stick with it.

    I personally have all my content indexed off of my main index page url, and block the archives (author, category, tag, date)

    That’s my simplified understanding. You may want to do some research to make your decision.

    https://yoast.com/ is a good starting point

    https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

    Thanks! That was a good read!

    that’s right esmi, there is no dupclicate content penalty ?? lol , cause I get first page using duplicate content Though I am not proud about it! cause my Adsense CPC suck’s lol ??
    and for zimbrul I think you should do what you think is best by providing usefull information about author/you, ignore about SEO over do or what ever it calls! just do what you like as long its not over do I am sure you’ll safe! ?? just my two cent’s
    and if you want to knows about SEO read this as your SEO guides

    https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

    Having them crawled is actually good for SEO in my opinion. To not have duplicated content, add some unique content to each of the pages.

    Thread Starter zimbrul

    (@zimbrul)

    To not have duplicated content, add some unique content to each of the pages.

    …I’m not very experienced with WP so can you be a little bit more specific how do I do that? Thanks in advance
    Zimbrul

    Can anyone shed some light on the below issue I have with my site:

    I started a new site 6 weeks ago. I did a lot of SEO work on it and within
    2 weeks I was ranked page 1,2 and 3 for all my targeted keywords.
    I tweaked it a bit more which had positive effect on the rankings. At this point I had only 5 backlinks pointing to my site.

    Week 4 I started working on the categories and tags and set All in one SEO pack to index categories and tags. I thought the more indexed pages the better.

    What happend was that I fell off the Google charts and the only thing ranking at page 30-50 is a couple of my tags.

    Is this by coincidence or is it because the indexing of categories and tags?
    Have any of you had the same thing happening to you?

    Timi Lindeman

    P.S I have not used any black hat techniques for backlinking or stuff like that.

    timi9731, the same thing happened to me when I started using All in one SEO pack. I have uninstalled this plug-in, but I still have pages that are indexed with categories, tags, and archives. Have you found a fix for this yet?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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