Should I NoIndex My Categories in Wordpress?

Here's an excerpt of a reply I wrote to a comment on my blog recently:

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"...All the other check boxes and fields I leave un-checked, although you'll find hundreds of people who will tell you to noindex tag archive, category archives and date archives.

The reason they tell you this is because it is supposed to reduce the 'risk' of duplicate content.

This arises because each post on your site can be accessed via a number of different links: its main link, its tag archive, its category archive and its month archive.

However, if you read Google Webmaster's Guidelines you will see that Google understands that blogs work this way and do not, therefore, penalise blogmasters for having duplicate content simply because the same content [on the site] can be accessed via a number of different links on the site.

Additionally, the inclusion of the Canonical Url tag indicates to Google which the primary url for a post is. Although this is a new tag and not yet formally part of the accepted standards, Google is fully supportive of it and uses it as part of its indexing process..."

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That excerpt is from a post on how to set up the All-in-one-SEO plugin - the full post is here:

http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/20...ne-seo-plugin/

You may also be interested in this video of a presentation from Matt Cutts - head of the Google Anti-Spam team - who talks about how to set up WordPress:

http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/20...wordpress-seo/

Cheers,

Martin.

imho i think u do not have to nofollow the cats as this helps enhancing the theme of the blog.