Should I disallow(robots.txt) archive/author pages with links already available on the front page?

Question

I am working on a simple Wordpress blog where when an article is published, it appears on ALL these pages:

1. Homepage - Headline(clickable) + 3-line summary

2. Parent category page - Headline(clickable) + 3-line summary

3. Child category page - Headline(clickable) + 3-line summary

4. Author page - Headline(clickable)

5. sitemap.xml

A good example of what I mean is:

http://wp-themes.com/twentyfourteen/

The "Worth A Thousand Words" article is available on the homepage.

But it's also available on the category page: http://wp-themes.com/?cat=1

And finally, it's also available on the author apge: http://wp-themes.com/?author=1

Does it makes sense to let Google crawl http://wp-themes.com/?author=1 knowing that all links on that page were already crawled elsewhere?

I've been in fact told that I should add all author pages to my robots.txt, under disallow, so as search engine bots do not spider /author/*(or anything with ?author for the above example) since all links on these pages are indeed available elsewhere.

Is this a good approach or maybe rel=nofollow is better, or maybe I shouldn't worry about this at all?

Answer 1

Googlebot is very well aware of WordPress sites and it's highly unlikely that it will punish a WordPress site for having content on several very common WordPress pages.

If you start playing around with robots.txt and rel=unfollow it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

You could install one of the SEO plugins that only places short versions of articles on author and category pages, but I don't think it's worth the effort in most cases. Moreover you're more likely to attract long tail keyword traffic with author and category pages as they are.

So in short: Don't worry about it.