Tags and Categories Ranking

[wearehappymedia]

Hello

A few times I have come across tags and categories ranking for some relevant search terms.

This seems strange as all category and tag pages would have 0 external links back to them - whereas pretty much every other page on the site would have external links.

In most cases thy seem to rank along with the page, for example: for the search term "voiceover recording xxxxx"  The voice over recording page will rank, followed by a similar tag page...

If I make the tag links 'nofollow' would that help stop this?

Cheers

[Ria_]

If you don't want your tags and categories to be showing up in Google (which is usually the case if they're just there for easy user navigation on-site), then I would recommend noindexing those bad boys completely. If you're using Wordpress, there's a plugin called Yoast SEO that will allow you to do that easily if you don't want to mess around with code.

[Tymen]

In addition to Ria: Yoast will give you the option to give priory to pages. This is a % where you can devaluate the tag pages. http://kb.yoast.com/article/216-can-i-change-the-sitemap-priority.

Good luck!

[amirfariabr]

The nofollow option would solve the problem.

In a website I run, some tags and categories rank better than other pages but that, for the user, is a good thing so I let them be like that.

In you case, I think it´s totally different.

[wearehappymedia]

Could using canonical links help in this situation? I guess if I have no external links to the category pages then canonical links wouldn't be appropriate here?