What to do with WordPress generated pages?

[amorbis]

I'm an SEOmoz Newbie and have a very specific question about the auto generated WordPress Pages.

SEOmoz caught and labeled the auto generated WP pages as Crawl Warnings like:

Long URL - 302 - Title Element to Long - Missing Meta Description Tag - Too Many On-Page Links

So I have learned the lesson and have now made those pages "no follow" / "no idex."

HOWEVER, WHAT DO I DO WITH THE ONES THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN INDEXED?

Do I...

1. Just leave them as is a hope they don't hurt me from an SEO perspective?

2. Redirect them all to a relevant page?

I'm sure many people have had this issue. What do you think?

Thanks

Dominic

[AlanMosley]

Let then 404 and eventualy drop from the index, or remove them from WMT, unless they have external links, there is no use 301'ing them

[amorbis]

How long do you thing it will take them to drop off the index?

How do I remove them from Webmaster Tools, what function should be used?

No external links that I saw, just a million way to get to the same blog information.

Thanks Alan...

Dominic

[AlanMosley]

Site configuration
   Crawler access
      remove url

[amorbis]

Thanks Alan... Forgot about that function.

How do we make sure Google no longer crawls and index those EXTRA WP pages?

**Will the Yoast SEO Plugin work? Or is there a better way? **

Of course I want Google to see new Blog Posts, but not the other crap.

Thanks

Dominic

[AlanMosley]

in never use wordpress, buut in general, you want to exclude the urls in robots.txt

You are probably better of using a canonical tag in the pages pointing to the true url

[ShaMenz]

Hi Dominic,

If you want pages to be removed from the index and ensure that they are not crawled again, you do exactly what you did with the others EXCEPT for one detail - the robots meta tag that you use should be "noindex, follow.

If you use "nofollow" you are trapping all incoming link value on that page and preventing it from flowing internally through your site.

Yes, you can add robots meta tags using the Yoast SEO plugin. You will find the features you are looking for in the "Indexation" section. Read the support documentation and on-page instructions carefully and you should be fine.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[AlanMosley]

good point about the nofollow, should of mentioned it myself

[amorbis]

Thanks Sha... I'll work on this today!

I didn't realize how "crappy" my site is from an SEO perspective.

Dom

[AlanMosley]

Thats is good news, it means you have room to improve, you dont want to find you have every thing spot on and still dont rank.

[amorbis]

True... But mine is a disaster!  

I may need some air and ground support from some of the experts.

I'm assessing the damage now...    I'll get it!