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1. drkknght
   Member
   Posted 1 month ago #

   My blog is set up so that categories are "hubs" for content -- and yeah, I know that's more or less the definition of "category" :) But on this particular blog (toonbarn.com) there are likely fans and followers of specific categories that ignore the rest of the content.

   Currently, each category page has the "noindex,follow" meta code within them which, to my knowledge (and please correct me if I'm wrong or dumb) tells Google not to crawl and promote those pages. The reasoning in most blogs is that they feature content that can be found elsewhere.

   But because my categories are so diverse, I essentially want each of these "hubs" to be like their own homepage -- thus I'm thinking I should remove that bit of meta info.

   My questions are:
   1) are my tag/Google assumptions correct?
   2) would my move be "bad SEO", or cause listing troubles?

2. drkknght
   Member
   Posted 1 month ago #

   also, if this does not cause "SEO damage" (is there a better term for that?) are there other related things I should watch out for?

3. alism
   Member
   Posted 1 month ago #

   It's not really a WordPress question at all, so you might be better off asking on an SEO forum to get a better response, but here's my opinion anyway...

   The way I understand question 1 would be as follows...

   "noindex,follow" means Google WILL crawl the page, and any links they find in it, however they won't index it - ie, they won't return that page in their search results.

   A reason that people use that tag is indeed to prevent 'duplicate content'. Personally, I think Google has got a lot better with the way they handle duplicate content, so I don't think this is as big an issue as it perhaps was 18 months ago/two years ago. Without that tag, Google will still do a half decent job of returning a relevant page. Using this tag though, you're basically just making the decision for them when there's a choice of similar content available.

   I don't think it does any "damage" either way to be honest, your site appears to be doing quite well traffic-wise as it is. Are you "optimizing" it as well as it could be? Well that's a toughie.

   My thinking in your case would be that you have got quite a lot of content, and it may take quite a few clicks to drill down to find the really deep stuff. So by removing that noindex tag, you would effectively be bringing that deeper content 'up' a level (if you see what I mean) and making it more likely to be found, so I think I'd be willing to try without it for a few months myself.

   HTH.

   Oh by the way, I remember looking at your site in another thread, quite like it! Don't stick too many ads on though. :-)

4. drkknght
   Member
   Posted 1 month ago #

   Heya alism, thanks for the response -- and glad you like ToonBarn (sorry about the ads :)

   Your thinking seems sound to me. I'm always worried about some type of Google blacklist, or something, but I figure it's worth a shot to try for a few weeks/months to test the results.

   I'll give it a whirl!

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