Social Meta Settings: Link Relationships Clarification

Hi cyborg88,

Honestly, I am not clear how you find the time to respond to all these questions, build a free plugin, and put food on the table.

I’m not sure either! Maybe my nickname should be cyborg ?? (well, it is Cyb(e)r… :)).
But they key is, is that I’ve automated a lot of my work already, so I build websites in a matter of hours rather than days :).

And thanks ??

Back to your questions:
Question #1:
Yes and no. This is a very subjective matter and should be taken in with caution. It’s all a bunch of “if, or else” cases.

Let me explain, from this I think you can draw your own solution/conclusion:

(sub-)Category and Tag could be used interchangeable in these examples.

Case 1:
You never post anything. All archives, like tags, categories, dates, etc. are empty. This will automatically disable indexing of those archives, and might even return 404. No action is needed.

Case 2:
You have a category named “News” and you only write about the tag “Local” under News. All posts you write have at least these values:
1. News Category.
2. Local Tag.
3. Author Archive.
4. Date Archive.

Because 1, 2 and 3, 4 now aren’t variable, they overlap. It’s most likely that all types of archives have the same post count, so the News Category, Local Tag and Author Archive are exact copies of each-other. The only difference is the title (and maybe slightly the layout). This means you’ve created duplicated content.
In this case, you should disable indexing of all but one of those archives. Category is more apparent than Tag, and Tag more than Author, and Author more than Date. You should hold onto that order, but it could be different for your website.

Case 3:
You have a category named “News” and you only write about the tag “Local”. Your colleague also writes under “News”, but with the tag “National”.
If you write 3 local posts per wee, but your colleague writes 20 in a week on National, this could happen:
1. News Category and National Tag overlap.
2. News Category and Local Tag differ.
3. Author Archive and Local Tag are the same for you.
4. Author Archive and National Tag are the same for your colleague.
3. Date Archive e.g. only contains 10 post, they most likely overlap with National Tag.

Different story, same answer: Many overlap. You should enable indexing for the Local Tag, but disable it for the National Tag. You should disable indexing for the Date and Author Archives as well.
This leaves the News Category to be the only category with the posts containing the National Tag, so it should be indexed.

Case 4:
Unless.. (continued from case 3):
You only post about News.
So your News Category and Home Page are the same now.
You should then disable indexing for the News Category.

Quite simple, yet so complex…:
It was a big question to ask myself about disabling the Author Archives by default. Taking all these variables into account, it’s possible to determine whether it should be indexed or not. For now, the following option does the trick already very well:
Apply noindex to every second or later archive page?

This reduces the changes of overlapping categories very well already, and it’s recommended to use that.

But I’ve disabled that option on theseoframework.com:
Reason: I don’t use tags, only categories. And all my posts are exactly where they belong. I also don’t keep a “blog”. And if I were to have one (which I kinda do), I’ve disabled it from indexing ;).

Conclusion:
Make sure you don’t have overlapping pages. The default settings work very well for almost everyone. If you’re concerned and you know what you’re doing, take a close look the example cases above.

Question #2:
It’s not related. It’s simply a Canonical URL showing the Search Engine if the Pages/Archive-pages are related to another Page/Archive-page. This allows Search Engines to index the right page on the SERP. They do not link different Pages or Categories/Tags to each-other. They only link to them-self if they’re paginated.

If you know about and use <!--nextpage-->, you should enable the tags for Posts and Pages as well. This adds a little more memory usage but it’s very negligible.

All information about your second question is found here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

I hope this helps!

Hey Sybre:

Whoa…thanks for the timely and detailed follow up.

Your hypothetical scenario with explanations and reasoning will likely be helpful for many visitors of this forum.

The strategy requires some processing for those, including me, still in the earlier stages of understanding Best Practices SEO.

Thus, if Categories are created for every post on a blog-based website, and tags are not used, then search engines will index all of those posts based on the categories. Therefore we should disable indexing for the blog page? If so, I took a quick spin through the .2 update but could not find a no index for “blog” per se. Perhaps a silly question, but how do we disable the indexing for the blog component?

Additionally, under the “Link Relationships” tab, by choosing the first option of “rel” link tags to Posts and Pages would this issue be addressed even somewhat?

According to Siteliner, I am running about 40% duplicate content and am therefore attempting to address this via best practices.

Again, thank you for your insights and patience.

Hi cyborg88,

If your home page is the blog, you can disable indexing of this page within the SEO Settings page, I strongly advise against doing so, as your home page is, well, your home page! Which creates an identity for your website and where everything comes together :).

If your blog page is not the home page, it’s assigned to a page. Every page has SEO settings within a metabox.
If you link to your blog page rather than categories and tags, I advise keeping the blog indexed rather than the categories and tags. Otherwise, you should disable indexing for the blog page.

Simply keep in mind that you shouldn’t have copies of pages, which are easily created through categories and tags, this should be prevented.

I hope this helps!

Hey Sybre:

Apologies: I was on an extended trip!

Thanks again for your insights.

Allow me to recommend and simultaneously request that you build a course(s) on Udemy or Teachable. I would willingly and thankfully invest in your course as would many others. You take the time to explain concepts, and I think if you invested thought toward a course, these concepts could be elaborated even more clearly and provide us with an opportunity to learn. It also offers you an opportunity to be financially rewarded for all of your insights.

I am convinced many, many people, including myself have an extraordinarily large list of questions and tackling those would also afford you an opportunity to be compensated for your guidance.

Please give it some thought man, because it would be so helpful.

Hi cyborg88,

I hope you had a nice trip!

I’m not going to make monetized tutorials, as there’s already so much good information present.

Even more so, as it also benefits me and everyone I know: Best SEO practices usually comes down to creating good and understandable content for your visitors, that they want to read, both on desktop and mobile, without being annoyed or confused and of course on a fast website.

Going further and really optimizing the details is almost never needed, the default settings and a lot of detection within The SEO Framework should automate all the finer details :).

Stuff like this (preventing duplicated content) is a really tough job to do automatically, but the penalties for those are luckily not that steep; so it may be overlooked, although it will fall out of the best practices.

I hope to achieve a good layer of information within the plugin itself and of course on the plugin’s website, when I find the time :).

Until then, I’m more than happy to help you guys out with any questions you have, no compensation needed (although a donation every now and then is very appreciated!) and I will always try to respond as accurately as possible :).

Well, it was worth a shot trying to get you to build courses! haha

Thanks for all of your time.

I definitely will!
But then for free, and of course when I find the time to make them :).