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I'm working on SEO for my WordPress page, and I'm having second thoughts about having my tag archive indexed. I'm not using categories at all, so I've set robots to noindex, follow for category overviews, making tags the main taxonomy.

Part of me says that having tag archives indexed is useful because those pages are full of content around one specific keywords, and they also link to more pages concerning those keywords. Also, the posts are truncated with a 'read more' link, so there's not going to be a problem with duplicate content.

On the other hand, these pages might dilute the pagerank for my actual posts. What is the use of people finding my tag archive pages if they could also find actual articles? Wouldn't it be better to just follow the links in my tag archives but not have those pages indexed?

Should I index them or just let google follow the links?

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If you're going to block your tag archives then you also need to remove the tag cloud from your pages as you'll still be diluting PR as PR is sent to every page you link to even those with nofollow or blocked by robots.txt. Those pages don't get to keep that PR but the PR is sent to them anyway diluting the PR sent to your other pages.

I say let those pages be indexed. They're a great way to target specific keywords and can drive traffic to your website. I don't think by hiding them from the search engines that you'll be doing yourself any good.

I also think you're paying way too much attention to PR. Yes, it's a Google ranking factor, but it's nothing to go removing pages from Google's index for.

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  • Well regarding to your last comment, this part of SEO is my final step, after optimizing the user experience and writing content. I'm not basing my entire website around this particular SEO strategy, it's more like a cherry on top. Also, I do remove certain pages (like the category archives, search results and author archives) from Google. I don't think removing pages from Google's index is 'paying too much attention to PR' per se. But yeah, I guess you're right. Thanks for the advice :)
    – Stephan Muller
    Nov 26, 2010 at 15:57
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Personally I like to let google run rampant on the theory that it's better too much crawled/indexed than too little.

I know lots of people would disagree due to potential duplicate content issues but I wonder if we get too hung up about that. For example, a friend has a site with around 15,000 products, ALL duplicate content yet it appears on googles front page for his keywords on an ongoing basis.

Google expects to find duplicate content and knows that it can be legitimate. No retailer is going to rewrite dozens/hundreds/thousands of products descriptions.

My art collection blog site running the Thesis theme had by canonical url turned on and noindex/nofollow on for some attributes by default. Using the Firefox plugin SEO Doctor to check why google didn't love me I found some of my site (unique content) was reported as 'non-indexable'!

It never hurts to check that google's not ignoring more than you thought because your website telling it to.

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