Should We Index These Category Pages?
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Currently we have marked category pages like http://www.yournextshoes.com/celebrities/kim-kardashian/ as follow/noindex as they essentially do not include any original content. On the other hand, for someone searching for Kim Kardashian shoes, it's a highly relevant page as we provide links to all the Kim Kardashian shoe sightings that we have covered. Should we index the category pages or leave them unindexed?
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I believe you should properly work on optimizing your category pages and make them follow to search engines.... the reason why you should do this is because optimizing will help you stay away from duplicate content and once search engine will find it relevant against user query... it will automatically going to rank and bring your targeted traffic.
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They are already marked as follow, my question is whether or not to index them
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yeah! optimize the pages in such a way that it kill the duplicate content issue and then let those pages indexed in Google!
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If you can, implement a "snippet" mentality where you write unique content in at the top of those categories, and then provide the links and a short excerpt under each link below (in the case of blog posts)
This often helps eliminate problematic duplicate content issues. I would recommend at least 100 words of pure unique content for those category pages above the blog posts to start.