Should I Index My WordPress Categories and Tags?

After a lot of experiments, research and observations on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress blogs, I came to fall in love with this Theory of Not Indexing WordPress Blog Categories and Tags on search engines. You might wonder why.

Google, the leading Search Engine made a write up few years back after their Panda  Update concerning poor quality pages. The more poor quality pages you have on your blog, the more your blog fails to rank on Google Search for your Keyword because Google would consider your blog as spam. It is therefore necessary to index your quality contents and nothing more.

Reasons Not to Index Tags and Categories

• Google bots might penalize your tag and category pages for duplicate content because they carry excerpts of most (if not all) of your blog contents.
• Since the category and tag pages carry only excerpts, it would be considered as poor quality contents in the eyes of Google, and this can in turn make Google Bots to consider your blog to be a spam yard.

Now you can see from my point of view why I won’t index my Categories or Tags on my blog?

How to NoIndex Category and Tag in WordPress

Now, here are two simple ways to set your WordPress categories and tags to noindex ;

• Using Robots.txt
• Using All In One SEO Plugin.

Method #1: Using Robots.txt

The Robots.txt file is a file on a web server that tell search engine bots where and where not to go, what and what not to index. Now we would use the robots.txt file to restrict the search engine bots visiting your blog from indexing the categories and tags on your blog.

1. Login to your cPanel, Click on File Manager and access the root directory of your wordpress blog.
2. Click on the robots.txt file and click on Edit.
3. The robots.txt file normally look like this
   

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /wp-admin/
   Disallow: /wp-includes/

   Simply copy and paste this code under the above code

   Disallow: /category/
   Disallow: /tag/

   It should then look like this

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /wp-admin/
   Disallow: /wp-includes/
   Disallow: /category/
   Disallow: /tag/

4. Then Save the file and that’s it

Method #2: Using All In One SEO Plugin

If you do not wish to get your hand dirt with codes, you can make use of the All in One SEO Plugin. Here is how to configure it.

1. Simply Install the All in One SEO Plugin on your WordPress blog. Incase you don’t know how to install a plugin,
   Read: How to Install a WordPress Plugin
2. Then in your WordPress Dashboard, click on Settings > All in One SEO.
3. Select the Enable radio button beside the Plugin status. Scroll down to Use noindex for Categories and tick the checkbox beside it. Also in Use noindex for Tags Archive, tick the checkbox beside it.
4. Now click on Update Options.

You have successfully set your wordpress blog Tags and Categories to NoIndex.

Any Method of usage is up to you. Expecting to see you ranking on Search Engine result soon.