Category Pages - Noindex? (Large Content Sites)

emerge

emerge

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Currently building a large content site (inspired by Larcha and MrMedia). Here's my situation if anyone can help me out:

- My site is based in Generatepress and has 3 distinct categories (sub-topics).
- I have put all 3 categories into my main menu.
- All pages are also paginated (200+) on homepage.

Should my category pages (currently in menu) be set to noindex, follow? Also, would I do this for author pages? I've seen my largest competitor do both.

Setting to noindex kind of makes sense because then I have the homepage with ALL content paginated and then also in each category page which isn't necessarily unique content. Google may see this as dupe content and punish/remove it from the index.

Thanks all!
 
emerge said:
Should my category pages (currently in menu) be set to noindex, follow? Also, would I do this for author pages? I've seen my largest competitor do both.
Click to expand...
No, absolutely not. Do not set them to noindex (but do have them follow'd).

That's the simple answer. Here's my complex answer. With GeneratePress you should have no problem using hooks to add unique content to the categories, since there's only three. I make this extra unique content only show on the first page of the paginated series.

And from there, I would 100% absolutely recommend keeping the /page/1/ top-level pages of the categories indexed. You're flowing a lot of page rank to those pages. Make them useful and you can take down some keywords with them.

What I prefer to do from there is to set the paginated pages, meaning /page/2/ and beyond, to be no-index. This is because, if you're trying to build a giant site and only have 3 categories, each is going to have a zillion paginated pages that don't have unique content on them at all.

Is it a problem if you leave them indexed? No. Is it a cleaner indexation if you do as I said? Yes. It gives you clearer data in Search Console's Coverage Report, keeps your Panda quality score high, etc.

Just because you set the paginated pages to no-index doesn't mean you should set any links to them as nofollow. You still want page rank flowing to and through them and Google crawling them. I just don't like having them in the index. And I think it's better for Google and for me.
 
I feel like this is one of the most confusing topics on on-page SEO. It should be so simple.

I currently just index all (after doing what @Ryuzaki said previously) based on something that John Mueller said earlier this year (just let them index and I couldn't find it again after looking right now). I haven't seen any differing results.

Now I am thinking of going back to my old system as per Ryu. The thing is, this should be so simple, Google just tell us what to do! I agree than pages /2/ onwards are likely to be of little and/or rank for anything.

Here's my code to noindex page2 onwards.

Code: 
   <?php if ( is_paged() ) { echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />'; } ?>
 
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Apologies for the late reply on this, I put my head down and continued publishing instead of stopping and wondering every aspect of the site. A real problem I have...

I have now moved to the site to a different theme, this new theme sets the cat pages to noindex, follow. All pages are indexed and it seems to be just fine.
 
I'm of the opinion of index, follow

I also look after a large site.
And I was actually also in the school of noindexing /?page=2 onwards until I saw this blog post:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-long-term-noindex-follow-24990.html
So it's kind of tricky with noindex. Which which I think is something somewhat of a misconception in general with a the SEO community. In that with a noindex and follow it's still the case that we see the noindex. Snd in the first step we say okay you don't want this page shown in the search results. We'll still keep it in our index, we just won't show it and then we can follow those links.

But if we see the noindex there for longer than we think this this page really doesn't want to be used in search so we will remove it completely. And then we won't follow the links anyway. So in noindex and follow is essentially kind of the same as a noindex, nofollow. There's no really big difference there in the long run.
Click to expand...

Overall... I think this is a pagination question rather than a category question?
What I arrived on was that category pages drive a lot of traffic for me so...
  • Page 1 (I call this the Search Result SEO Page /moneykeywordcategory)
    indexed and followed, self canonicalize, edit the template so that it is maxed out On-Page

  • Page 2 onwards (The paginated pages /moneykeywordcategory/?page=2 )
    indexed and followed, self canonicalize, edit the template to to max deoptimize to prevent cannibalization (go as far as killing the H1), edit the sitemap.xml to exclude /?page=2
Thoughts on this?
https://www.seoquake.com/blog/paginated-pages/

As an off-topic, this is the best pagination resource I know of if that's something you want to follow.
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/technical-seo-library/pagination-seo-guide/
 
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