Wordpress: Tags, Categories, Sitemaps, NoIndex...

[GeorgR.]

I have it down to that you let either Tags or Category archive pages indexed but not both. I read this on many sites.

On one of my sites i now configured in All-In-One SEO to set NoIndex to categories and archives - but let Google index tag archives.

The reason on that particular site is that i only have very few (3) categories but MANY tags. (On other sites i usually set NoIndex to tags and let categories be indexed).

My question now is whether to include categories, archives, tag pages on my XML sitemap? Right now this is off since its default in Google XML sitemaps plugin.

Anyone have any tips?

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Originally Posted by GeorgR.

I have it down to that you let either Tags or Category archive pages indexed but not both. I read this on many sites.

On one of my sites i now configured in All-In-One SEO to set NoIndex to categories and archives - but let Google index tag archives.

The reason on that particular site is that i only have very few (3) categories but MANY tags. (On other sites i usually set NoIndex to tags and let categories be indexed).

My question now is whether to include categories, archives, tag pages on my XML sitemap? Right now this is off since its default in Google XML sitemaps plugin.

Anyone have any tips?

Hi George, it appears that you are leaning towards including your categories and not your tags and I would agree with that for the purpose of the xml sitemap.

For the site itself, it depends on your theme and how it handles category pages, archives and tag pages.

Most traditional "blog" themes, just do a reprint of each and every post within the category on the category archives pages, which leads to the blanket suggestion that you should noindex your category pages and archives since they present the same content as you already have elsewhere (on the individual post pages).

However, if your theme is set up to handle your content like a site, and not a blog, and thus your category pages are landing pages in and of themselves, that actually serve as a directory and index to your themed content (and not just reprints of each post/article in that category), then you would be depriving yourself of a wealth of potentially valuable search traffic by assigning noindex to this content, particularly your category landing pages.

If you are interested in reading a little further, I've got a post titled "Why posts not pages" that discusses some of the background and thoughts about the larger issues at play with respect to noindex/nofollow.