Site structure- category pages

[villarroel]

Hi,

I'm relatively new to SEO but have tried to apply all best practices to my site. However, I've hit a stumbling block when it comes to whether or not to index my category pages. http://istudyenglishonline.com/category/expressions-idioms/

General info: the site has been created with Wordpress and has a directory of English idioms. Each idiom is associated with one or more categories that it falls under (emotions, sports, food etc). Each category has its own page where the list of idioms will be. As each idiom often has more than one associated category, the same idiom will appear in different category pages, thus creating duplicate content. However, I have given each category page its own unique description. The issue is, when there are numerous idioms, the category page will have more than 1 page. I don't have the ability to create a unique description for each subsequent page of the main category.

I know that the very model for some vertical search engines (such as indeed.com) is to create such landing pages and that the more "categories" that they have assigned to their job ads, in this case, the more pages created and the more pages indexed in Google. This seems to work very well for them.

My question is, am I doing things right? Should I be doing anything to the subsequent category pages to avoid duplicate content? My plan was to have so many idioms associated with so many categories that I have a fair number of landing pages indexed in google, thus attacking the long tail keywords. However, I'm not sure if I am going the right way.

Any advice would be much appreciated!

[chris.kent]

I would structure the site a little differently. First off each idiom should a single URL and just be included in categories. So instead of category1/idiom, category2/same idiom, category3/same idiom it should just be root folder/idiom then include the idiom in different categories that way you avoid duplicate content issues.

[villarroel]

Thanks Chris. I'll look into how to do this with wordpress.

[evolvingSEO]

SIMPLE: All you need to do is "noindex subpages of archives" using the Yoast SEO Plugin. This keeps the subpages from being indexed, but the first page in each category will get indexed.

Check out further resources;

• My post on WordPress SEO
• A recent Mozinar someone did on WordPress

-Dan