When I posted about how to recover from Google panda, I mentioned that you should let your quality pages be indexed by Google and keep others as “noindex”, but “dofollow”.
This goes for your tags, categories, author pages, and monthly archive pages.
Two major reasons to noindex WordPress categories and tags:
- Avoid post duplication.
- Only quality pages will become part of Google Search.
The second reason is very important after the Google Panda algo became live because Google mentioned that Google Panda now focuses on quality content.
Obviously, your tags and categories pages can’t be considered “quality pages” for search engines. They are good for user-navigation, but they don’t add any value to search engines.
Many WordPress users are not aware of how they can keep WordPress blog tags and categories as “noindex”.
Here are some ways to add the “noindex” attribute to your category and tag pages.
Ways To Noindex WordPress Categories and Tags:
Noindex your tags and categories
This part is subjective as it depends on what SEO plugin you are using. If you are using SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast or All in one SEO, follow the links I’ve listed below, where I explain how you can “noindex” tags, categories, and author archive pages.
If you are using your theme’s SEO option, you need to use the “noindex” option in front of the tags and categories archive.
Here is a video that shows where to access these settings in Yoast SEO plugin:
Do let us know if you are keeping your WordPress tags and categories as “noindex” or “doindex”. Which methods are you using to keep them “noindex”?
Suggested Reading: How To Effectively Manage WordPress Tags
Don’t forget to share this post!
I learned to configure the Yoast seo from Shoutmeloud and then never allowed tags, categories and others as they create copy content issues and we have to use canonical for all separately. Better to noindex tags, categories, etc….
Thanks
Nikhil
The Categories are indexed to search engines automatically, but now I control them.
Thanks for this valuable post.
Sir,How i can noindex categories and tags on blogspot platform..
Blogspot doesn’t give you flexibility for using plugins or any other method for noindex categories.
I would mostly Recommend you to migrate your site to wordpress.
this post might be helpful for you: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-migrate-from-blogspot-to-wordpress-with-301-permanent-redirection-without-loosing-traffic.html
Thanks…..the link u have provided is very helpful…i will migrate my blog
I am using SEO by Yoast Plugin.This is very useful Plugin to make Blog more visible on google search engine. I didn’t know about the SEO plugin before 4 months back. a few days ago I was searching for something like SEO.then I found your post (how to set up Yoast WordPress SEO plugin configuration).It was really awesome.thanks for Sharing your experience.
Hi Harsh!
Thanks for the post!
I just want to index quality posts and pages on search engines, but I can’t. This post help me to do that. I have a question, I deleted some posts 30 days ago, but till now show all deleted posts in google search result, which redirect visitors to NOT FOUND page. What to do?
Harsh I use XML site map generator on my blog http://www.nomadline.com/
I decided to check the option to not generate XML sitemap for my site.. earlier it was generating and getting indexed..
As soon as I did it ranking of my posts fell.. I could not understand the reason.. I was forced to reinstate and gor the ranking back on google search…
Will you be able to explain the reason or have a look at it
Should i excludes tags and categories from xml sitemap too?
I understand that when I let tags and categories noindex, they are excluded from xml sitemap automatically. Is it right?
very helping post written, but I want to know that I want to use categories and tags for my news portal site and I made then no index and do follow. now I want to know that does google will deny my site from being included in google news and the second question is if I use tags, is it necessary to show tags in some specific area of my own site??
Great advice. I have WordPress and Yoast’s SEO plug in. I thought I had deindexed tags, under the “XMLSitemap” option to “exclude taxonomies”, but apparently I hadn’t. There is another place, under the “taxonomies” tab which is in the “titles and metas” section. Here there is another option to exclude tags, categories, then under the “Other” tab is a way to exclude author and date pages from the index.
I am praying that now, finally, I have done enough to get them out of the index.
Wish it wasn’t so complicated.
Thanks for your great advice and video.
J
Thank you for sharing this. Much needed, I will try this to see if it help me resolve my duplication issues.
I personally use WordPress SEO by Yoast to to keep my cats and tags as noindex. They can be very low quality, and I mean like really low quality on your site. These are also great tips you shared. Kudos.
Nice explanation. However I am in a mess here. I never noindexed my categories, and in current situation I have some really high ranking categories and even some very high ranking posts!!
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/
Thanks for the information… I like to know where i need to select “Add noarchive meta tag”, Dmoz and yahoo directory… i hope they too affect the site ranking…
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?
Good article harsh. Yoast plugin gives more power to nofollow setting.
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 .
thanks harsh now i changed settings in my thesis theme…….
Thanks harsh for sharing these tips for blocking categories and tags especially useful for WordPress blogs.
Thanks Anil for your comment and for your Email..I will reply back to it soon.
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.