Questions Regarding Wordpress Blog Format, Categories and Tag pages...

[goldbergweismancairo]

I'm looking to make some optimizations to a website I'm working on but wanted more input before I get started:

Currently, when blogs are posted to the website, the URL for each post looks like this:www.mywebsite.com/blogpost

I've heard that for whatever reason, the best practice is to make sure that the blog posts get posted to a blog sub-directory like so: www.mywebsite.com/blog/blogpost

If I were to make this change, I'm assuming I would have to 301 redirect all of the existing blogs to their new locations. Is this change worth doing and are there any other considerations I should be taking into account?

Also, I'm aware that there are certain schools of thought that category and tag pages should be no-indexed to avoid duplicate content issues. Can anyone shed some light on this from first hand experience?

Thanks in advance!

[Whebb]

Hello,

In general I would agree that placing the blog under some category is ideal, but depending on the type and size of your site I don't think it will make or break the rankings and may not be worth the effort. As you stated you would need to 301 redirect all the posts to the new URL in addition to editing the posts themselves. Make sure your sitemap and canonicals are updated to reflect this change as well.

As for category and tag pages the general rule of thumb is to noindex them but have the pages followed, but there are a few things to consider here. If categories and tags are setup correctly then it would be ok to index them IMO. If posts are only placed on one category then duplicate content will not be an issue. With tags, again if done in moderation then duplicate content should not be an issue as each tag page should display different content. For example say you have a cooking site and you want to tag some recipes. For a vegetarian lasagna some proper tagging may look like. vegetarian, pasta, quick meal. Improper tagging would be, veggie lasagna, lasagna, pasta, vegetarian, vegan. You don't want to create similar tags and too many tags, that is where you can run into duplicate content issues.

As you may be aware there are some great wordpress plugins for setting up these kinds of things. The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best WP SEO plugins and can help you easily setup the aforementioned items.

Hope that helps.

[Twist360]

I agree with jStrong, The Yoast SEO Plugin does take care of a number of issues with Wordpress's default install. It gives you a nice Red, Amber, Green gauge on each post/page based on your meta data.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi There

To answer your first question about URL structure, I would see slides 12-15 in this Mozinar I did: http://www.slideshare.net/evolvingseo/hands-onwpseodanshure (you can also watch the whole Mozinar here).

In short - if your site is mainly a blog, it's ok to do site.com/blog-post but if your site is a blog within a site you probably want to do site.com/blog/post-name

You will want to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new one. I think it's worth it.

For many answers about tags etc you can see my post about WordPress SEO here but in general;

• categories - index
• tags - noindex
• author archives - noindex for single author blog, index for multi-author with customized author pages
• dated archives - noindex
• subpages of archives - noindex

You're not noindexing to avoid duplicate content, you're noindexing to avoid too many pages being indexed that don't need to be, and probably won't rank anyway