Optimal Noindex Nofollow Settings For Categories And Tags Pages

This seems like the most controversial topic of the SEO league and why not , since there are many versions to it and there are SEO experts that back each of them with their reasoning .

Not to mention that causes a lot of trouble to someone looking for information on whether to make the categories and tag pages nofollow and noindex or let them be dofollow . Everybody with a website has stuck up with this question in their blogging journey alteast once and the same is evident from the number of similar questions on various forums and all of them still leave with a question mark .

So here I am putting together an article to put to rest all the speculation and giving my version on the issue and hoping that it gets digested well and puts an end to the debate.

Nofollow Attribute Settings For Tag And Category Pages

The Nofollow is a link attribute which has been around for a long while and changed the way the entire internet behaves . It is highly unlikely that anyone will not know this tag and so to say it is something that does not need an introduction still a quick recap for those who are unaware . You can read more about the nofollow tag in my previous article .

Nofollow attribute is a link attribute that tells the search engines not to pass PR juice through that link . It has been tweaked in 2009 and a lot of people are under the wrong impression since then . Here is the new nofollow treatement

So it is clear that the link juice is still drained from a link which is nofollow will still drain your link juice irrespective of it being nofollow or otherwise . This move was made since Google spotted that people are misusing the nofollow tag which was actually designed to cut spam was actually used to aid spam by using nofollow and still promoting the untrusted (paid) links .

The message is clear now – IF you don’t trust the page enough to pass a voluntary vote to it then rather not link to it instead of linking to it with a nofollow .

What The New Nofollow Means To The Blogger

Never add nofollow to any links that point to internal pages of your site be it category pages or tag pages .

Nofollow Settings For Tag Pages – I would rather suggest to not use the tags at all since they result in a lot of PR loss without any outcome . The logic is simple , you don’t want to see a tag page in a search result and neither does a SE want to present a tag page as a search result . So there is no use passing PR juice to tag pages and if you use them with nofollow anyway, it will suck PR .

This might sound radical but it is best to not use tags at all . Very rarely do visitors click on tag pages, since there are already dedicated category pages, take your own example – when was the last time you chose to click on a tag instead of a category to read more about a topic ? A feature is present does not mean it has to be used always , tags are useful mostly for photoblogs and blogs with more attention on media .

Nofollow Settings For Category Pages - There is no other option but to make it dofollow . Sure it will not help any bit since the category pages also have a low ranking but making it nofollow will also not help in any way as it did earlier . Also now a nofollow is a clear indication if an untrusted site and you don’t want to send a wrong signal to the SE about your own site . Don’t be too harsh with the link love , its your own site after all!

This also helps to get the articles get indexed faster and always make sure you are using the canonical tag for single post pages .

The same logic still holds good – if you trust the site then link to it with an editorial link otherwise using the nofollow is going t odo no good . I will cover the PR sculpting and effecient use of advanced techniques to maintain and elevate ranking in the next post , let us concentrate on ,onsite settings since the post is about it .

NO-Index For Category And Tag Pages

There seems to be more debate on this topic than solutions . Everytime this question is poped by a novice blogger and a supposedly SEO expert types in a solution to it , he is bombarded with controversial views from tons of other esperts . So the two sides of the debate are – some people swear by the fact that if the category has a keyword (which is always the case) and has good articles then indexing it will help you. And others claim that increase the number of indexed articles in the SE archive will mean more trust is passed .

Frankly speaking none of them is wrong , but none of them are completely right too . Let us assume that a category page has 10 posts, so in order to get just 10 extra pages in the SE index you need to write 100 posts ! Do the math .

As for the keyword representation , neither is that going to help in any way for a simple reason – when was the last time you saw a search engine result was a category page  or a tag page ? Keep thinking , others admire the fact that category pages have low or practically absent link juice since we never build links to our category pages, no one does! Because we all want our individual posts to rank for their primary keywords .

So it makes no sense to get the index stuffed with un necessary pages that will never see the light of the day . It can infact backfire to look like keyword cannibalism since the category and the single page will have a same meta description and that will result in both the single post and the category conflict and not show up in search .

Conclusion - I hope I have cleared the nofollow and noindex settings with proper justification and that should leave you with no doubt . But I still know there will be a lot who would like to think otherwise so please drop your views in the comments section and we can have a chat about it .