Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
I have a recipe food blog and use wordpress, but my recipes are usually in more than one category...?
-
The recipes are in most cases in more than one category (usually two) each. Do and (and if so how) need to set each post to one canicol url? E.g A recipe on Peas is in healthy foods (which is the default wordpress cat.) and also Vegetarian Dishes. I use YOAST for wordpress
-
Thank you for this much appreciated information!!
-
If you are adding value to the category pages and making them useful places for the user to land and not just a list of links, then by all means, you should keep them indexed. And yes, in this case you still need for each page to have a canonical URL, so you will have to pick which category a recipe best fits in. (You can still have the link on two category pages, one of them just needs to be the canonical.)
-
Thanks for getting back to me Patrick - I have managed to implement however paragraphs for the category archive pages as I wanted to utilize these also for example :
Chicken Breast Recipes
Chicken breast information and details on cooking with chicken
- chicken posts
Therefore - when optimising for "chicken breast recipes" I wanted to optimise the category archive itself.
Is this not a good idea then? As I have a fair few categories I would like to add information too? Also I was under the impression it may help me to have the categories such like this www.domain.com/chicken-breast-recipes/chickenpost.
I have looked at the Yoast set up - would I have to go into each post/recipe and add the direct canonical url within the SEO page info at the bottom ?
Thank you for your time.
-
Hi there
I would noindex your category pages and also canonicalize all tags or category post variation URLs to the proper post URL. From there, I would run through this resource from Moz on WP optimization.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site Footer Links Used for Keyword Spam
I was on the phone with a proposed web relaunch firm for one of my clients listening to them talk about their deep SEO knowledge. I cannot believe that this wouldn’t be considered black-hat or at least very Spammy in which case a client could be in trouble. On this vendor’s site I notice that they stack the footer site map with about 50 links that are basically keywords they are trying to rank for. But here’s the kicker shown by way of example from one of the themes in the footer: 9 footer links:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RosemaryB
Top PR Firms
Best PR Firms
Leading PR Firms
CyberSecurity PR Firms
Cyber Security PR Firms
Technology PR Firms
PR Firm
Government PR Firms
Public Sector PR Firms Each link goes to a unique URL that is basically a knock-off of the homepage with a few words or at the most one sentences swapped out to include this footer link keyword phrase, sometimes there is a different title attribute but generally they are a close match to each other. The canonical for each page links back to itself. I simply can’t believe Google doesn’t consider this Spammy. Interested in your view.
Rosemary0 -
Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
One page with multiple sections - unique URL for each section
Hi All, This is my first time posting to the Moz community, so forgive me if I make any silly mistakes. A little background: I run a website that for a company that makes custom parts out of specialty materials. One of my strategies is to make high quality content about all areas of these specialty materials to attract potential customers - pretty strait-forward stuff. I have always struggled with how to structure my content; from a usability point of view, I like just having one page for each material, with different subsections covering covering different topical areas. Example: for a special metal material I would have one page with subsections about the mechanical properties, thermal properties, available types, common applications, etc. Basically how Wikipedia organizes its content. I do not have a large amount of content for each section, but as a whole it makes one nice cohesive page for each material. I do use H tags to show the specific sections on the page, but I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types. What are the communities thoughts on this? As a user of the website, I would rather have all of the information on a single, well organized page for each material. But what do SEO best practices have to say about this? My last thought would be to create a hybrid website (I don't know the proper term). Have a look at these examples from Time and Quartz. When you are viewing a article, the URL is unique to that page. However, when you scroll to the bottom of the article, you can keep on scrolling into the next article, with a new unique URL - all without clicking through to another page. I could see this technique being ideal for a good web experience while still allowing me to optimize my content for more specific topics/keywords. If I used this technique with the Canonical tag would I then get the best of both worlds? Let me know your thoughts! Thank you for the help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jaspercurry0 -
Domain.com/XXX or domain.com/blog/XXX ?
i have a business and a side blog on the website. is it fine to turn my blog to domain.com/XXX instead of domain.com/blog/XXX? does it in anyway of these affect the SEO?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
Submitting blogs to blog aggregators
Hello, I am reading about getting great links to my site and it mentions these blog aggregates. http://technorati.com/ (PR8) http://www.blogarama.com/ (PR6) http://www.bloghub.com/ (PR5) http://regator.com/ (PR5) http://www.icerocket.com/ (PR6) Can someone explain how these work? And what is the best practice when using them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | infinart0 -
Tags on WordPress Sites, Good or bad?
My main concern is about the entire tags strategy. The whole concept has really been first seen by myself on WordPress which seems to be bringing positive results to these sites and now there are even plugins that auto generate tags. Can someone detail more about the pros and cons of tags? I was under the impression that google does not want 1000's of pages auto generated just because of a simple tag keyword, and then show relevant content to that specific tag. Usually these are just like search results pages... how are tag pages beneficial? Is there something going on behind the scenes with wordpress tags that actually bring benefits to these wp blogs? Setting a custom coded tag feature on a custom site just seems to create numerous spammy pages. I understand these pages may be good from a user perspective, but what about from an SEO perspective and getting indexed and driving traffic... Indexed and driving traffic is my main concern here, so as a recap I'd like to understand the pros and cons about tags on wp vs custom coded sites, and the correct way to set these up for SEO purposes.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com1 -
Do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?
Hey everyone, Just wondering, do pingbacks in Wordpress help or harm SEO? Or neither?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Subdomains vs. Subfolders Wordpress Multisite
I am in the process redesigning my organization's website using wordpress multisite. I am currently planning on creating subdomains for each of the locations, as I thought that having a keyword saturated domain name would provide the best rankings. So the Omaha office would look like this: omaha.example.com Would it be better to go with example.com/omaha? Things to consider: Google adwords is currently a huge source of our traffic. Despite having very good organic rankings, we receive most of our traffic from pay-per-click sources. The "display URL" has dramatic effect on our CTR, so I want to avoid subfolders if possible. (example OmahaEmergencyDental.com receives far more click thru's than EmergencyDental.com) Each location currently has it's own domain and website (omahaemergencydental.com) these sites/pages have been in place for several years Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LoganYard0