No-index or 301 - custom wordpress archives

[benct]

Hi,

We are using custom wordpresss posts to showcase different services we provide, these are then grouped within custom archives. These custom archive pages are our main keyword landing pages and traffic generators (although ranking is fairly average).

It's come to my attention that these custom posts have also been listed in the wordpress standard categories, with an identical title, excerpts and near identical urls as the custom archives. This appears to have been the case for quite a while. We are concerned that this is may causing duplicate content issues and unsure how to proceed.

We have been advised to simply no-index the redundant 'standard' categories but as they have been indexed for some time we are cautious of causing any upset with search engines (although the categories are indexed they are not ranking for any major keywords)

Are we best 301ing the redundant category to the custom archives or using a canonical tags or simply no-indexing the categories like other archive pages?

Any advice is aprreciated

Many thanks

BC

[LauraSultan]

Do you want users to be able to access the blog category URLs that were inadvertently created?

If so, use canonical tags. Users will be able to access both URLs, but Google will fold them together in the search index.

If not, use 301-redirects. Users will be redirected to the custom archives.

Either way, Google will eventually remove the blog category URL from the index and any link equity from backlinks will flow to the correct URL.

[benct]

Hi Laura, thank you very much for the advice.

No we don't need users to access the redundant categories, there is no unique content on them. I can arrange to have the 301 put in place

Thanks