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#7635 – removing tag pages or blog categories from indexing in serps

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’
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Monday, 15 February 2021 18:10 UTC
furtherdg

Hey. I am not sure the best way to handle removing the tag categories from being indexed using sh404sef. I have a blog set up and really only want the articles themseves being indexed to save crawl budget but also the tag and category pages are not things I want to target for SEO but don't want to mess things up and end up hurting our SEO.

For example this page on the site is ranking well https://xxxx.com/marketing/charleston-search-engine-optimization

but I don't want google indexing https://xxxx.com/marketing
or https://xxxx.com/marketing/
or https://xxxx.com/tag/search-engine-optimization
or anything with /tag/  in the url

but I don't want to set that up arong and somehow remove articles so they don't get int=dexed if that makes sense.  So all these articles have tags as well as categories associated with them but the actual blog articles if clicked on directly have this structure:

https://xxxx.com/marketing/what-is-influencer-marketing-and-how-does-it-work
https://xxxx.com/marketing/charleston-sc-social-media-marketing-experts-demystify-social
https://xxxx.com/marketing/selling-and-the-value-of-connection

so currently all in one main category https://xxxx.com/marketing/ ... that might change in the future to include another category but I don't thinks so.

Any help or direction you can provde as to how to do this safely ... mainly avoiding those tag and category pages from being paid attention to and focusing our crawl budget on the actual articles is the goal.

Many Thanks --- Alex

Monday, 15 February 2021 19:05 UTC
wb_weeblr

Hi

 I have a blog set up and really only want the articles themseves being indexed to save crawl budget

So the first thing here is that as long as you have only a few hundred pages, maybe until a couple thousands or so, you really, really don't need to worry about crawl budget, Google will crawl everything without any worries.

So all thesee articles have tags as well as categories associated with them but the actual blog articles if clicked on directly have this structure

With that respect, the URL structure (whether it has categories or tags in it) does not matter. The site structure is what matters, that is how the crawler (or visitors) got to that page.

The thing here is more about discovery. If you do not have tags, as all pages are in "marketing", you basically only one series of pages. To discover all blog posts, Google has to follow page 1, page 2, page 3, etc. Again, until you get a few thousands pages, that's fine, they'll do it with no issue.

But - in theory - what you want is more direct access to the inner pages, which is one of the (only) role tags can actually play.

Any help or direction you can provde as to how to do this safely ... mainly avoiding those tag and category pages from being paid attention to and focusing our crawl budget on the actual articles is the goal.

The only way they would not get attention is if you:

- noindex them

- or remove them (ie at least the tags, you can remove).

Tags in your case may be useful for discovery so I'd leave them. And none of your category or tags page can get any attention in terms of ranking because they do not have any actual content. It means they cannot compete in search results with your blog posts.

So really I don't see any issue here. No indexing does not seems to me a valid option here.

All that said, I'm definitely not an SEO consultant so for a definitive answer on the matter, that's what you'll need to get!

Best regards

Yannick Gaultier

weeblr.com / @weeblr

 

 

 

 

 
Thursday, 18 March 2021 05:34 UTC
system
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