Two reasons.
- As long as search engines are concerned, on most blogs category pages will carry irrelevant information since category names are likely to be too general to rank for (like my categories WordPress, SEO etc.)
- Category pages are source of duplicate content
As I already stated before, tags are the real deal for any blog.
I also decided to call upon my plugin skills again and came up with a plugin that will do all this for you automatically.
As an added bonus I included nofollow_the_author_posts_link function, which you can use to replace your the_author_posts_link in theme templates, adding nofollow to author pages.
Download WP-Nofollow-Categories.
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Posted in: WordPress
TAGS:category noindex nofollow, index follow seo, nofollow category listings, nofollow category wordpress, nofollow noindex wordpress, noindex comment, noindex wordpress pages, search engines follow noindex 2009, seo noindex categories, tags noindex wordpress, wordpress nofollow, wordpress nofollow categories, wordpress noindex archive category, wordpress noindex categories, wordpress noindex comments, wordpress seo
Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
13 Comments
Vladimir,
Love your posts and plugins (wrote about Smartlinks here: http://richardcummings.info/wordpress-link-plugins/). On this though, I disagree slightly. I think that category pages are often very enticing to visitors as they contain summaries of all articles on one topic.
I usually ensure that summaries appear on category pages (instead of the full post) and then remove the no-index tag on them.
I have sites in fact where the category pages are the most visited.
Just my 2 cents,
Richard
category pages are good for visitors, my point is they don't make much sense when search engines are in question.
Thanks for the wonderful tips and Plugins. Say i used this permalink structure %postname% Do I have to look out for duplicate content with categories?
We come here often to get good advice and yet again you have not failed us! Great topics and thanks for learning us!
Hi Vladimir
Thanks for releasing this plugin, but let's assume you have on a site 1000 tags and 20 categories. Is it then still a good idea to follow and index the tags? Wordpress will create 1000 pages that will have duplicate content for tags and only 20 for the categories.
Answer to Best Blogs comment {seesmic_video:{"url_thumbnail":{"value":"http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/XdMa1hJ82d_th1.jpg"}"title":{"value":"Answer to Best Blogs comment "}"videoUri":{"value":"http://www.seesmic.com/video/eVjzayRsYT"}}}
Steve thank you very much, that's was such a cool video comment! :)
Thanks! {seesmic_video:{"url_thumbnail":{"value":"http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/H1wZqg3ewd_th1.jpg"}"title":{"value":"Thanks! "}"videoUri":{"value":"http://www.seesmic.com/video/OQFPo2nhjm"}}}
Hi Vlad, I can see the nofollow tags on this page via FF, alot of red! However you do follow the following and was wondering why:
- Comments (in recent comment sidebar)
- Poll (view results) link
- seesmic at bottom
So the first thing a spider would crawl on your site would be:
- services, projects, forum, tags...
Thank you for the plugin!
Splendind, like the simplicity of it!
info {seesmic_video:{"url_thumbnail":{"value":"http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/StYePJ3LuR_th1.jpg"}"title":{"value":"info "}"videoUri":{"value":"http://www.seesmic.com/video/TXUax2IChv"}}}
Well done. Looking forward for your plugin release.