Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages

[Rignite]

Hi there,

Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs?

The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content.  And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term.

Just curious what others think.

Thanks!

[DennisSeymour]

Noindex tags and your author page (if you only have 1 author)

For categories, leave it alone, just add a bit of unique content there, much like how ecommerce sites do it.

[Rignite]

Thanks everyone so much for your fast and helpful feedback!

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there! In addition to the responses above, I'd also recommend checking out the Yoast plugin. On a brand new blog, I recommend noindexing the category pages until a good amount of content is built up in each category, including unique content on each category landing page. You may find this post by Dan Shure helpful: http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success. Best of luck!

Christy

[MoosaHemani]

I believe this depends from case to case. On my own blog I have disabled tags but not categories and this is because I believe few category URL are very much user friendly.

Before you actually implement anything, ask yourself if this will hurt user experience or not and If the answer is no then just go ahead and do that!

Hope this helps!

[LesleyPaone]

I would, personally I have disabled my tag page and author page since there are no tags, and only one author. As for the categories I have them no-indexed.

[gazzerman1]

Yes, actually John Muller at Google said this is a wise thing to do.

First ask yourself is there really any benefit in your users going to any of those pages?

Duplicate content is not a major issue and can be wildly ignored but many blogs go over the top with tags etc.. Making Google's life harder when trying to make a decision on what content to show for results.

I personally went as far as removing the front end of wordpress completely and coded a very quick and simple version of the front end myself, so it still gets managed using the wordpress interface like a content management system.

Works a treat and the response from Google SERPS was great. Also reduces the amount of pages Google needs to crawl over and over to look for changes. This will see Google returning more frequently to the key pages looking for updates.