Do you set your Wordpress categories to No-index?

[jan roos]

I am wondering if I should set my Wordpress categories to no-index through the all in one seo plugin. I have all my posts on my home page and then I have categories which shows posts that is on my home page and matches the category. Will I be penalized for duplicate content?

Cheers

[Istvan Horvath]

How many posts do you have... that you can keep all of them on your home/index? Above a certain number it becomes very unfriendly having 15,000 posts all on the main page

If the categories are good keywords - why would you set them to noindex? Rather think in this way: use the keyword in the category name to create urls having those keywoprds:
example.com/section/category-keyword/
and set the category templates to display only excerpts. Although even with full posts I never found it detrimental... but I prefer to have 'archive' views (like category, monthly etc, listings) to show only the excerpt instead of content.

[jan roos]

I am showing only excerpts on my home page as well and then the same excerpts on the categies. Which makes me wonder about duplicate content.

[Istvan Horvath]

YMMV... but here is a mini case study:

I have a blog which wasn't updated since last July (more than half year). The settings is as told you above, more exactly full short posts and posts with "more" tag on home page (5), and excerpts in the category archives.

I receives over 5,000/mo visitors and about 30% of it is sent by search engines, mainly G. It doesn't look for me as being "penalized" for the mythical duplicate content.

[jan roos]

Originally Posted by Istvan Horvath

YMMV... but here is a mini case study:

I have a blog which wasn't updated since last July (more than half year). The settings is as told you above, more exactly full short posts and posts with "more" tag on home page (5), and excerpts in the category archives.

I receives over 5,000/mo visitors and about 30% of it is sent by search engines, mainly G. It doesn't look for me as being "penalized" for the mythical duplicate content.

Thanks for the info. It looks like I should be fine then.

Cheers

[lonniewa2]

Well a bigger concern for me would be the flow of linkjuice and pagerank. if you set-up you permalinks like "/%postname%/ I think that it might be a could idea to noindex categories pages because you will have juice flowing to:

http://www.myblog.com/mypost/ and
http://www.myblog.com/mycategory/mypost/

What do you guys think?

[TheGrooby]

From Google: "Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a "regular" and "printer" version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, we'll choose one of them to list. In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results."

More here: Duplicate content - Webmaster Tools Help

[Istvan Horvath]

Originally Posted by lonniewa2

What do you guys think?

First of all I think you didn't understand what the thread was about.

Your second link is NOT the URL of a category page/archive.

Other than that I always think that all the SEO "gurus" over-complicate everything... and many people blindly believe everything