Parent Categories Empty and not Indexed
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Hey Sybre
My new woo site has 3 parent product categories each of which has numerous child categories. The parent categories will not contain any products. They are for child category organisation and are linked directly to my homepage.
It is essential that the Parent categories are indexed and the child categories not indexed.
On the individual parent category pages I have marked the TSF settings Index, Follow and archive.
However, when I view the product overview page, and scroll over the blue (not green) Index section of a parent category I get a tool tip popup as follows:
Index: Category is being indexed. But there are no posts in this term; therefore, indexing has been discouraged.
What does discouraged mean?
I note that the parent categories are not shown in the site map. But upon trawling through your support threads I understand that that is an standard TSF feature (to save on resources).
I also viewed the source code for the Parent categories and note that the robots meta appears as follows:
<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />If the robots meta does not contain noindex, how is indexing being “discouraged”?.
And more importantly, how do I overide discouraged? Because I must ensure that my parent product categories are indexed.
Kind Regards
Max
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Sybre
Thank you very much for your prompt reply.
I have already quadruple checked this as I want to go live with my new build.
I know what noindex means (and how to check if it appears in the robots meta in the source code).
So that we are clear, I will restate the situtation:
It is a woo site so the categories are Product categories.
I have 3 parent categories with each one named after a targeted key SEO word.
The parent categories are linked to from my homepage and from my main menu.
Each each of the 3 parent categories has 8 or more child categories (and the child categories are full of products).
The parent categories contain no products and are for SEO and organizing the child categories.
On the edit page for each of the PARENT CATEGORIES I have ticked INDEX, FOLLOW and ARCHIVE.
On the edit page for each child category I have ticked NOINDEX, FOLLOW, and NOARCHIVE.
On the edit page for each product I have ticked INDEX, FOLLOW and ARCHIVE.
When I view the Category Overview page the “I” part of the TSF SEO bar for each PARENT CATEGORY is blue (not green as one would expect) and if I scroll over it I get the pop up tool tip that reads:
Index: Category is being indexed. But there are no posts in this term; therefore, indexing has been discouraged.
The SEO outcome I am after is that Google indexes my Home page, each of my 3 Parent categories and each of the products in the child categories (but not the child categories themselves).
I have not used tags at all.
At this late stage of my site development I am (horrified) to discover that the Parent Categories are not being indexed (even though they are ticked INDEX). I have built complex custom navigation and headers based on the Parent and Child categories. If I have to do away with the Child categories and use tags I will have to reassign several hundred products and redo my nav and headers. So as you can appreciate, this is a very important issue for me.
What do I have to do to ensure Google indexes?:
Homepage
Parent Categories (3x)
All products
But NOT Child categoriesOr am I faced with the horror of replacing my child categories with (no indexed) tags and reassigning all products back to the three parent categories?
Kind Regards
Max
Hi Max,
This is assumed because I don’t have a link to your site. However, the SEO Bar doesn’t lie.
This is where it goes wrong:
The parent categories are linked to from my homepage and from my main menu.
[But…] The parent categories contain no products and are for SEO and organizing the child categories.
To emphasize:
When the parent category contains no posts, it’ll be regarded a 404 page by WordPress by default. This implies noindex; for good measure, The SEO Framework enforces that rule via its meta tags.I think you should set it up like this:
- Assign the product to all categories, it is the parent and children.
- Assign the product’s primary category to the lowest child.
Then, with the categories, you should leave it as-is:
- Leave the indexing states as-is: Childs have “noindex, noarchive” assigned, parents have no robots rules assigned.
- Do link to the parent categories, don’t link to the child categories.
What this will achieve is:
- Your parent categories will be indexed and will show all products.
- Your child categories are only there for the linking structure.
Your products will obtain the linking structure and they will inform search engines of the breadcrumb related breadcrumb trail.
I believe that’s what you want 🙂 It’ll ensure your query for Google’s indexes, and your anxiety will flow away.
If you wish for me to confirm my assimilations, send me the site’s URL, with pointers to the categories in question. You can do so via my contact page.
Sybre
Firstly, thank you very much for all of the valuable assistance that you have provided me over the past few years. It is much appreciated.
After thinking this over last night. I had also come to the conclusion that perhaps a solution was just to add the products to both the parent and child categories. There is no duplicate content issues because the child cats are marked no index…correct?
When embarking on this current project I favoured using child cats over tags for organizing my products for two primary reasons. Firstly, tags are not hierarchical. Second, I thought that I would have to rely on a Woo category sidebar menu plugin and I couldn’t find anything that handled tags the way I needed.
That said, the sidebar menu solution I am now using does cater for tags.
So if need be I can delete my child cats and reassign the products therein to woo tags (with the same names and permalinks as deleted cats). And mark the tags NoIndex, NoArchive.
If you think that using tags instead of child cats is a more acceptable/suitable/robust solution I can revisit my site, delete the child cats, create similarly named tags, and reassign my products.
Whether I use child cats or tags, my intention will be to mark all of these NoIndex NoArchive as I want all of my SEO juice flowing:
Homepage > 3 Parent Categories > Products
Please let me know what you think. Should I use subcats or tags to organise my products (below) the Parent Category level?
Oh and if empty categories are marked 404 by WP and TSF flags them as NoIndex, why is NOIndex not present in the robots meta tag when I view the source code for each of my empty parent categories?
Thank you for your help.
Kind Regards
Max
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