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I several days ago somewhere read that category and tag pages should be noindexed. But later on somewhere else, I read that, they only increase rank for search term, but overall traffic decreases- said one from his experience.

So, if I just concern about traffic, not about individual search term that much, should I make those category and tag pages as indexed to google? I am confused which is the best to do.

Thanks in advance.

Regards Rana

2 Answers 2

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Here is a great post on the subject:

No Indexing WordPress Taxonomies: Do or Don’t

To summarise, he found that if he noindexed the tag and category archives and installed a better pagination plugin, his traffic increased by 30% in two weeks.

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  • Thanks for the reference. Its one's personal experience. I saw similar opinion on the reverse case. So, I think we need more evidence to decide the right strategy.
    – Rana
    Apr 11, 2013 at 6:37
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Generally the rationale for using noindex on category and tag pages is that they tend to be near duplicates of each other and of the index page. Avoiding content duplication is a key aim of most SEO strategies. Thus the noindex approach.

As with most SEO questions, the best answer will come by thinking about what people want.

Do you have the sort of site, and the sort of content, where optimised archive pages for each of your categories would be a useful landing page from search? Or, are your category pages really just something that people use as a means of navigation when already on the site?

If it's the former, you need to design pages in such a way as to be well optimised for the category terms, e.g., with some unique editorial content and so on. If it's the latter, the typical WordPress template page with a noindex is probably best.

But don't trust me: trust your site. If you're really not sure what's best, experiment and let your analytics data guide you.

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