Seo Yoast Plugin

[VillasDiani]

In Yoast seo plugin, under the general settings is Sitewide meta settings,under which there is an option to either check or leave unchecked Noindex subpages of archives which says: If you want to prevent /page/2/ and further of any archive to show up in the search results, enable this.

I am very confuse if to check or not. What is the best seo practice? Most of our posts are in categories which have 2-4 pages.

[AndreVanKets]

The reason for this option is to avoid duplicate content from being indexed.

Could you give an example of one of your category pages?

Greg

[VillasDiani]

Thank you very much for your reply. This is category posts with villas(which I do not understand why they are as archives) http://villasdiani.com/rentals/beach-villas/ We have as well http://villasdiani.com/rentals/boutique-hotels/ (which also shows as a archives and I don't know why) and this is category with posts(which doesn't show as archives) http://villasdiani.com/category/kenya-news/

[AndreVanKets]

The examples you gave aren't duplicates so don't worry about enabling that option.

All the "rentals" pages are using the archive template. Essentially its just a template like any other template you have set up. Usually archives list historical articles and posts and are generally no-indexed but your archive template is set up differently.

2 things i noticed.

You don't have a sitemap on your home page and nothing here: http://villasdiani.com/sitemap.xml

Your archive title tags im guessing are generated automatically, you might want to change the title tags on all "rentals" pages and only include the main descriptive keyword.

I hope this helps.

Greg

[VillasDiani]

Thanks a lot for all this helpful information, this certainly clears things up for me.

Our sitemap is generated by the Yoast SEO plugin and is located on http://villasdiani.com/sitemap_index.xml, is this a good practice? I have noticed lots of web analysis not finding this sitemap, should there be a link to it from the homepage or footer?

Yes I think the title tags on rentals pages must be generated automatically (I think it creates an H2 tag for each title) but I have no idea to prevent it from doing so or setting the main descriptive keyword, any pointer in the right direction to get this done would be highly appreciated

Many thanks again!,

[AndreVanKets]

1.) Your sitemap isn't indexed by google (I cant find it in the search results) site:http://villasdiani.com/sitemap_index.xml

• Include a link to your sitemap on your home page footer (preferably site wide)

• Submit your sitemap to Google in Webmaster tools to confirm its been indexed.

2.) Come to think of it,  because your archive template pages target the same keywords, perhaps you can actually check that option to no-index paginated pages as there is no need to index them. (all paginated pages target the same keywords creating whats called "cannibalization" which essentially means your pages are competing with each other)

While your at it though, be sure to also update the title tags for these archive pages.

IE: "Beach Villas" could be "Kenya Luxury Beach Villa's"

When you edit the page, you should see the Yoast tool near the bottom with an option to include a Title Tag.

Good luck!

Greg

[VillasDiani]

This is really helpful info! The issue with th sitemap is actually strange because webmaster tools does index it but it seems to vary, sometimes it says 'no sitemap submitted' and sometimes it is fully indexed, I had this for one of the many quirky characteristics of WT, I hope including a link in the footer will solve this.

The only part I am not fully certain about is to set paginated pages to no index, since the theme uses the archive template for custom post types, wouldn't this mean that all posts on page 2 - 3 , etc would no longer be indexed?

Thank you so much for your valuable time!

[BlueprintMarketing]

You want to add your XML Sitemap. To Google Webmaster Tools

& the html Sitemap to the websites footer

see

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/site-navigation-for-seo/

Tom