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I'm developing a WP site with a blog. I want to show the blog posts by assigning "blog" as a parent category to all posts and using that category archive page to show the blog posts.

I would not use the standard "posts page" in WP.

Then I read this: (with Blog Page he refers to the "posts page".)

The Blog Page gives out several indicators to social sites and Search Engines that it's a Blog. First and foremost, it's called a Blog, it has a collection of Titles with URLs assigned to them and some Themes even include Microdata. It's paginated, and with HTML5 multiple Article HTML-tags also may be output. [...] In fact, WordPress requires a Blog page to be available.

EDIT: Quoted from this thread.

Why would search engines care with what method the page showing blog posts is built? The parent category archive page also is "a collection of Titles with URLs" etc. and would be almost 100% the same as a "posts page" AKA "blog page".

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    As far as I know search engines absolutely do not care if blog posts have 'blog' in their URLs or not. And they also wouldn't care if your WordPress site has a blog or not. Where did you read this explanation?
    – Kevin
    May 29, 2016 at 11:41
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    WP doesn't require a blog to be available, since you can use pages rather than posts. Secondary Google can make sense of blog posts simply from the microdata contained on page, which most good themes include. Also, the URL is a mere indicator to Google, and users what the page is about, before they visit it, it's not required since Google uses many indicators, as does Bing, plenty of sites rank just fine with ID numbers in the URL rather than SEF URLS. New content is beneficial and that's why blogs are heavily promoted, its easer than creating another page, that will bloat the site.
    – Simon Hayter
    May 29, 2016 at 13:18
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    What’s the source of that quote? -- The quote doesn’t mention Google Search specifically, but "social sites and search engines". You are only interested in Google Search?
    – unor
    May 29, 2016 at 17:28
  • It sounds like that quote might be a bit out of date - Wordpress hasn't required a "blog" to be available for quite a number of years.
    – Tim Malone
    May 29, 2016 at 22:53
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    I added the source of the quote to the original post. Now that I re-read his post, I think maybe the problem is possible bugs in WP and plugins due to a lack of the "posts page" (as opposed to problems with search engines).
    – user64441
    May 30, 2016 at 15:25

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Google cares only about content (unique, correct headerts etc. ) and incoming links (from good sites with similar content) . Nothing more, nothing less :D

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Based in previous experience, you will be totally fine using a Blog category instead of the Posts Page. A number of years ago I created a posts-only website in WP, never had a problem with indexing and so on. As stated before, google cares about 2 things, Content and Recognition.

If your content is great, it will get the recognition it deserves, sure you can boost that recognition by doing article marketing and social interactions, those along with another ~200 signals are counted in by Google. It has never been a secret in SEO, content is the king in any form, as a wordpress site, as a simple HTML site, even in the form of a comment or social status, as long as it is human-generated and offers value.

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How your blog is built on the page makes no difference when it comes to SEO. The fact that it says "blog" doesn't even make a real difference in SEO. The whole point of having a blog on your site is to improve SEO through linking, fresh content, and keywords.

An average site may have no need to change most of its content over time. This makes the site go stale. But, by having fresh content added regularly, not only do you engage your audience but the content also improves your SEO ranking as long as it is appropriate and of a high quality.

As such it makes no difference for SEO to use a specific "blog" component of whatever CMS you are choosing to use. What you will find with the blog component is that it will use some rich markup, including things like OpenGraph. These will improve the blog for social media, but won't improve SEO more than simply having the fresh content.

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