: Wordpress Category/Tag Pages As Indexed Actually Help In Traffic? I several days ago somewhere read that category and tag pages should be noindexed. But later on somewhere else, I read that,

@Ravi8258870

Generally the rationale for using noindex on category and tag pages is that they tend to be near duplicates of each other and of the index page. Avoiding content duplication is a key aim of most SEO strategies. Thus the noindex approach.

As with most SEO questions, the best answer will come by thinking about what people want.

Do you have the sort of site, and the sort of content, where optimised archive pages for each of your categories would be a useful landing page from search? Or, are your category pages really just something that people use as a means of navigation when already on the site?

If it's the former, you need to design pages in such a way as to be well optimised for the category terms, e.g., with some unique editorial content and so on. If it's the latter, the typical WordPress template page with a noindex is probably best.

But don't trust me: trust your site. If you're really not sure what's best, experiment and let your analytics data guide you.

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@BetL925

Here is a great post on the subject:

No Indexing WordPress Taxonomies: Do or Don’t

To summarise, he found that if he noindexed the tag and category archives and installed a better pagination plugin, his traffic increased by 30% in two weeks.

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