When I posted about How to recover from Google panda, I mentioned that let your quality pages indexed by Google and keep others as noindex but dofollow. This goes for your tags, categories, author and monthly archive pages. There are two solid reasons to Noindex WordPress Categories and Tags
- Avoid post duplication issue
- Only quality pages will become part of search.
Second reason is very important after Google panda algo went live, as Google mentioned that Google panda focus on quality content. Obviously your tags and categories pages can’t be considered as quality pages for search engine.
Many WordPress users are not aware of how they can keep WordPress blog tags and categories as noindex. Here I’m talking about three ways by which you can add noindex attribute to your category and tag pages.
3 Ways to noindex WordPress Categories and Tags:
Robots.txt method:
This is so far one of the easiest method. All you need to do is to add couple of lines in your Robots.txt file and your category and tag pages will not be crawled.
- User-agent: *
- Disallow: /category/
- Disallow: /tag/
Robots Meta WordPress plugin:
This plugin is very useful if you wish to do a blog level SEO. You can make any part of your blog as noindex and more over using this plugin, you can keep your outbound link from homepage as nofollow. You can read more about Robots meta plugin here.
Thesis Theme Robots meta settings:
We all are aware of the fact that Thesis WordPress Theme is a SEO optimize theme and it comes with lots of built-in SEO option. You can configure meta settings from Thesis site options > Document head >Robots meta tags. Along with category and tag pages, you can put noindex meta tag to other part of blog too. If you new to Thesis, I would suggest have a look on How to Install Thesis WordPress theme.
Do let us know if you are keeping your WordPress tags and categories as noindex or doindex? Which method are you using to keep them noindex? Also you might like to read about How to manage WordPress tags effectively.
Subscribe Updates, Its FREE!
Article by Harsh Agrawal
Harsh has written 1206 articles.
If you like This post, you can follow ShoutMeLoud on Twitter. Subscribe to ShoutMeLoud feed via RSS or EMAIL to receive instant updates.
→ 
→ 
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I really like Robots meta plugin, because I have used it before I used Thesis theme.
Very handy and easy to use to achieve having nofollow on tags or categories.
Kimi there is no benefit of keeping them nofollow.. The idea is to keep it noindex but dofollow.. It’s better to keep all internal links as dofollow, as it will help in deep indexing.
Thanks harsh for sharing these tips for blocking categories and tags specially useful for Wordpress blogs.
Thanks Anil for your comment and for your Email..I will reply back to it soon.
thanks harsh now i changed settings in my thesis theme…….
This is a great tip to allow bots to crawl only quality post . I was aware of this before . What i was searching in google to know that how many pages were indexed it was showing me around 3X results than my post because it was crawling every tag and categories of my blog .
Good article harsh. Yoast plugin gives more power to nofollow setting.
Just because of SML i recovered from panda affect. Every article in this blog’s on SEO helps me a lot. Reading this article tells how to noindex these attributes but how do i make dofollow?
Will this way of adding robots text can help no index of category paginated posts for ex. /category/somename/page/2/ ?
Code:
Disallow: /category/*/page/