Category pages - SEO or deindex?
-
What is the best thing to do with category pages? Should I deindex them or use SEO on them? I use the Thesis theme and the Wordpress SEO plugin. I am just not sure what to do with category pages.
Also will they create duplicate content?
-
Just to follow up on this - I am ranking # 5 for a category page and it's a competitive keyword. So I am not sure deindexing category pages is the best idea and I am glad I didn't do it with my second and new blog.
-
I've also been wondering about this recently but I've made similar observations on a much smaller scale and it makes sense.
What about only displaying the excerpts on the category page, and use your unique (maybe?) meta descriptions as the excerpt?
-
I don't get any traffic to my category pages but of course my site is new so I am just getting a couple organic hits per day.
But my category pages do just give an excerpt. More than a sentence or two though. I already deindexed them. I guess I can revisit that later.
-
My category pages just organize all my blog posts. Nothing new.
-
I just remembered that Thesis and Wordpress SEO sometimes conflict. I made some adjustments and added some code to alleviate some of these conflicts but perhaps the deindexing of category pages was overrode by Thesis.
I just clicked on noindex category pages in Thesis. I also clicked on noarchive to category pages in Thesis.
Will that do it?
-
I am using YOAST SEO so that is good. So I don't have to do anything to get them deindexed?
If Wordpress SEO (by Yoast) deindexes my category pages, why are they showing up in my sitelinks? I tried to demote the category pages but they keep showing up. Thanks!
-
I have a blog with 150 category pages and they pull in kickass traffic. Lots of those pages bring in over 1000 visitors per month.
If you have long blog posts and display the first sentence or two on the category page that will not be duplicate content. It is no different than a category page for an ecommerce store. Category pages get out there and compete for serious traffic terms.
Lots of people say don't index them. That's not what I have found and if I noindexed them I would be walking away from a lot of income and more traffic than is received by the rest of the blog combined.
-
In every case i've seen they should be deindexed. Install YOAST SEO plugin and it will deindex them by default. It's a great plugin too.
-
Your category pages should be no-indexed if they don't have rich unique content per category. It is hard to say without seeing the category pages if it will provide duplicate content, but in most cases it will. You should also no index your archive area as well because that will definitely provide duplicate content.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Static pages with dynamic content: Good for SEO?
I wanted to know ones thoughts on reducing duplication by creating a static page with a few dynamic fields. Has anyone done this? If 75% of a page is static and 25% is dynamic, is that a good ratio? It's an idea I am thinking about to combat duplication issues affecting ecommerce pages. Some ecommerce sites generate a new page for a small change like size, but the content is the same. What if you could create a single static page and depending on the size chosen, only those fields connected to the size are dynamic? Everything else remains the same. For caching purposes, you always submit a cached page with default values. Wouldn't this work? Isn't this a solution for duplicate ecommerce pages? It would also help in ranking, rather than multiple external links across duplicate ecommerce pages, it would just be to a single page.
On-Page Optimization | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Deindexing Archive Subpages?
I am using Yoast Wordpress SEO and I have clicked on the option to deindex archive subpages. However, I have over 200 duplicate title tag errors in Google Webmasters and most are due to subpages. I am using the URL removal tool but I am going to create several pages every day which is just going to cause more duplicate title tag errors. I don't understand why the Wordpress SEO settings are not working. How can I get google to stop indexing archive subpages? My site tanked BIG TIME about a week ago. Every day it is worse. From 320 clicks a day to 30. Any help would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | 2bloggers0 -
Too many page links warning... but each link has canonical back to main page? Is my page OK?
The Moz crawl warns me many of my pages have too many links, like this page http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/industry/Accounting ...... has 269 links but many of the links are like this /jobs/jobtitles/Accounting?k=&w=3&hiddenLocationID=463170&depth=2 and are used to refine search criteria.... when you click on those links they all have a canonical link back to http://www.webjobz.com/jobs/industry/Accounting Is my page being punished for this? Do I have to put "no follow" tags on every link I do not want the bots to follow and if I do so is Roger (moz bot) not going to count this as a link?
On-Page Optimization | | Webjobz0 -
Your thoughts on page navigation
Hi again SEOmoz community. What are your thoughts on mainpage navigation. How it should be handled? Scenario 1. - links to the main sections with a mouse rollover feature where it shows subsections of the main sections Scenario 2. - links to the main sections, but the subsections are hidden and only visible on the click Scenario 3. links to the main sections and subsections allways visible I would like to hear you oppinions on this. What did you find as the best featrue, or did you try to find someting new entirely. What do you think would be the best scenario SEO wise and in the light of keeping links on page in decent numbers 🙂 Imo, Scenario 2 is the option to go with. Tnx in advance for all your replys. Sincerely, sinisa
On-Page Optimization | | TataSinke0 -
Should I autogenerate 25k pages?
My main product is database conversion software. As we support tons of databases, it's pretty easy to generate thousands of pages simply by creating a template and changing source/target database name, some information on how to connect etc. Of course, getting links to that many autogenerated pages is close to impossible. So, not wanting to endanger my main site (http://www.spectralcore.com) I created a separate site (minisite) for this product alone (http://www.fullconvert.com). In two months this new site is live, it got to the point of having over 1k visitors per month. That's for a site with no inbound links or history. Now, my question is - should I create equivalent thing on my main site, with different template to avoid duplicate content - and leverage history and authority - or Google can get me penalized for this practice. I don't think 25k generated pages are a bad thing, they simply provide for tons of highly targeted landing pages. Am I wrong?
On-Page Optimization | | metadata0 -
SEO Moz crawl has 3 missing page title errors when they are clearly there.
My SEO Moz crawl today has highlighted for errors where page titles are empty missing. For example: http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-entertainment/wedding-entertainment-kent This page clearly has a title as do the other 3. Is it a bug in the system or am I missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Page Rank Drop
Just trying to get more feedback - so we recently edited title and meta descriptions for existing website SEO and we've noticed in the past several weeks, our client's website has dropped out of the top 50 in a variety of terms we were targeting that they used to show up for (note: when updating SEO, we DID NOT remove any relevant terms we were targeting). When the website does come up in searches, it is the old meta description and title. So far, the feedback we've gotten is that first, it takes Google a few weeks to recrawl and index - however, we are now on week 3 after the changes and still no rebound in rankings. We were also told to check with the SEO Moz page grader to be sure the keywords were being optimized correctly - got As and Bs for the test terms I tried. We also submitted an XML site map to speed up the crawl process as another user suggested. We've tested the site with various tools to make sure there are redirect errors, etc. and everything looks fine. Again, it's now been 3+ weeks and no ranking rebound. Any other suggestions on what could be happening?
On-Page Optimization | | laidlawseo0 -
Pages not cached
Sorry for all the questions. I have dozens of article pages that are not cached by google. How can I get them cached?
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0