Should I nofollow my Wordpress tags?

[claus10]

I have a website that have a strong root domain (ranking on many terms) but the subpages (articles) doesn't rank well. My feeling is that the linkjuice is not flowing to them (not enough anyway).

When I run site:http://mydomain.com I have my root as the first result and the next many results are tagpages on my sites. I have arund 180 index pages, and I need to go to down to result #50 give or take before I see any subpage using the site command.

My website theme have the tags on every page possible. The tags are useful for my viewers, but not SEO useful, but I fear that they are dilluting my linkjuice. Should I nofollow and noindex them? Noindex makes sense (the tags are just duplicate content featuring snippets of text from the articles). But Nofollow would make sense too since I wouldn't send any linkjuice through the tags.

What would you guys do?

Bests regards

[Keszi]

Hi Thomas,

I remember that there was a mozinar (https://moz.com/webinars/advanced-wordpress-seo) that helped me a lot answering these kind of questions. I think that would be useful for you too.

Regarding your question: if it is useful for the visitors, but you believe it causes (in any way) duplicate content.... I would set them to noindex, follow.

If you have the time, watch the mozinar, it describes the issue quite in detail.

I hope it will help you.

Keszi

[claus10]

Hi Keszi

Thank you for your input. But why not nofollow them too? The tags will use the linkjuice instead of letting it pass to the articles?

[Keszi]

Read through this post by Rand: https://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow .

Quite old, but still valid in my opinion. So if you want to nofollow the tags only because of sculpting the follow links value, then there is no sense making it.

We are using a similar approach with pages we do not want to index, but they are beneficial for our visitors. (similar case to yours)