Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Hi there.

I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article )

Thanks

Martin

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Always noindex these where you can Martin as it avoids lots of duplicate pages being created. Yoast makes this nice and easy

-Andy

[Stellar_SEO]

I have to agree with you Andy. Avoiding the hassle of having duplicate content issues makes it worth no-indexing.

[s_EOgi_Bear]

Thanks for the reply

On their own page:  https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

[excerpt]On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all.

There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway.

My thinking around this is that if people are looking for "Articles on topicx"  then this would be more relevant to their search query because it's a collection of exactly what they are looking for - and more geared towards the 'long tail"

[Andy.Drinkwater]

noindex,follow is common for these pages. You want Google to be able to navigate their way around the links and pages, but letting tag pages in create lots of additional and unnecessary pages into the index. You never find these pages ranking in Google even when they are open.

Choose a good, logical category structure, promote your blog posts and the pages will all be found.

-Andy

[mstoic]

Yes. Absolutely correct. You should never index tag pages. These may be targeted but are of low quality with not much quality content. Moreover, they may have more keyword density than what you should have for a page to rank.

[Robin_Jennings]

I agree with everyone above. I use tags for internal search which it is fantastic for, but I don't use it for SEO purposes