Should I select "index" or "noindex" for these?

[TheChanger]

Hello everyone,

Today, I decided to take a closer look at my Platinum SEO Pack plugin settings. With that said, I discovered a few settings in which I am not 100% sure how to setup, these settings relate to:

• Categories
• Date based Archives
• Tag Archives

Now from a SEO standpoint should I allow the above items to be indexed? or not? and can you also please explain why?

I was thinking of setting them to "noindex" due to duplicate content.

Thank you,
Gordon

[TheChanger]

Originally Posted by Profit Sniper

You should set it on index to allow search engine bots craw through your tags and see the keywords you are actually optimizing for

Thanks for the reply

[Mike Grant]

Originally Posted by Gordon Hay

Thanks for the reply

Be careful, you could end up with dup content.

[createdevelop]

There seem to be a lot of people talking about tags today. Must be something in the water.

Firstly, I don't know about getting stung with dupe content. If you are using the canonical tag corrently, then this should not be a problem.

Second, tags and categories should offer your users a better experience, because they can find articles that interest them based on topics.

Lastly, for SEO purposes, tags are effectively optimised anchor text, so that should be a plus, surely.

We removed the nofollow/noindex attributes from our blog and we don't seem to have had any problems.

[TheChanger]

Originally Posted by mgtarheels

Be careful, you could end up with dup content.

Well it looks like I may be getting penalized for duplicate content. Earlier today when I checked my indexed pages, I discovered that four of my posts have been deindexed in favor of the tag pages. So with said, I am going to go ahead and set the categories, date based archives, tag archives to "noindex".

And hopefully my posts get re-indexed.