Wordpress: Should your blog posts be noindex?

[cschwartzel]

Wordpress defaults all blog posts to no index/nofollow

Is this how it should be handled? I understand the nofollow from the page.com/blog to the page.com/blog/blogtitle

But why noindex? We have Yoast installed and this is the default.

[Schwaab]

You blog posts should be indexed and followed.  It may just be the default so development pages do not get indexed by search engines.

I would recommend using no index tags on the various category, archive, and tags pages that are created when using a WP blog.  These pages can lead to a lot of duplicate content problems.

[EGOL]

If your blog posts are substantive in length and do not contain duplicate content then I would index/follow them.  A good blog post on a popular topic can bring in a lot of traffic.

Category pages can also be set to index/follow if they contain very short excerpts of the blog posts and if they each have enough content to be substantive.  When a blog is new and you have just one or two posts per category, each consisting of a short excerpt then I would not index them.  What you can do is wait until you have several posts in a category before you start a category page.

A superior method of category page treatment, in my opinion, is to create a page that present all of your posts in a organization that is more logical the chronological default that you get in wordpress.  Get a great image for each post and create a page that has your best posts, most popular posts, most recent posts presented for the visitor.  New visitors should see your best or your most popular.  Returning visitors want the new stuff.  If there are posts that you want everyone to see they can be placed in a prominent position.  This page can be rearranged if there is something hot in the news and you want to call attention to your writing on that topic.  This will be a growing adaptive page that is much more visitor friendly than the chronological.

[Christy-Correll]

Courtney, you may also find Dan Shure's guide on setting up Wordpress helpful.

[cschwartzel]

I did see this blog post a while back, and lost it....thanks for bringing it back to my attention. This is perfect!

[Christy-Correll]

Great! Best of luck, Courtney.