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Oh yeah, that's a great point! I've found that the category pages rarely rank directly, but you'll definitely want to double-check before outright blocking crawlers.

Just to check my own understanding, CleverPhD, wouldn't crawlers avoid the category pages if they were disallowed by robots.txt (presuming they obey robots.txt), even if the links were still on the site?

The tough thing here is that you're basically asking which is the less bad of two bad options. That's rough; I feel for you. Personally, I'd advocate taking an approach like the topic-focused one in Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts":

https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts

I know it's hard, but you'll be doing a great service to your client by educating her on why her tail-chasing approach is a waste of time. Otherwise, the two approaches you've described are pretty much equally ineffective, so flip a coin, my friend.

Category pages actually turn up as duplicate content in Crawl Diagnostics _really _often. It just means that those categories are linked somewhere on your site, and the resulting category pages look almost exactly like all the others.

Generally, I recommend you use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages in the category directory. Once that's done and your campaign has re-crawled your site, then you can see how much of the problem was resolved by that one change, and consider what to do to take care of the rest.

Does that make sense?

Knowing only what I do, I would think that yes, if they're proliferating what are effectively duplicates of their main corporate site, they'd end up with issues surrounding duplicate content.

I'd suggest reading up on the effects of duplicate content here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content. That page is pretty focused on duplicate content on a single domain, but it'll still give you an idea. With so much cross-domain duplicate content you'd face similar issues, though I wonder if some spam flags would be raised, too (I'm honestly not sure).

Of course, it's possible that all those duplicate domains canonical back to the original, or some other fix. But in general I'd expect there to be trouble.

Hi Ben!

Hard as it is to hear, you're really not likely to make much headway with links like that, rankings-wise. Directories really just don't have the value they once did, and it'd be pretty clear to the search engines that links from, say, Constant Contact aren't exactly "organic." That doesn't mean they'd _hurt _you, necessarily; it just means they're not likely to do you a lot of good.

It certainly takes longer, but you and your clients will be much better-served through organic link building. I'd recommend reading the Beginner's Guide to Link Building if you haven't already. It's a great place to start.

In addition to John's link to the Moz blog, I also can't recommend the Beginner's Guide to Link Building enough.

Looks like the question is legitimate and has generated some good discussion, but I've gone ahead and removed those links.

Donald seems pretty spot-on, but may I ask how old this site is? A DA or PA of 1 usually just means we haven't indexed the site.

Hi Karom,

That's a tough one. The community here is most able to help with practical marketing questions.

We do have a list of recommended companies that may help, but I can't guarantee they're in your area:

https://moz.com/community/recommended

I'm not an expert on Wordpress, so I can't help much there. Start here for noindex/nofollow, though:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

I'd imagine it depends on the context and how it's presented. Can you provide a bit more detail on the case you're referring to?

Patrick nailed it, but I'll add that when you see a drop in DA, the first thing you should do is look up your competitors in Open Site Explorer. If they've dropped too, then it's very likely you're just seeing the effects of an index refresh.

Noindexing the tag pages will likely work. You could also try using robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages that have URL parameters unique to those tag pages, but you'll want to make sure it won't affect your site's crawlability before you do that.

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Hi Charles! When were these redirects put in place? It's very possible OSE just hasn't seen them yet.

It's on the old side, but I'd add Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research" to the post Massimiliano linked.

Hi Jac!

Are you concerned about the category pages themselves being indexed? If not, you can block crawlers from accessing them with robots.txt. You might even try adding "noindex, follow" to them, to ensure crawlers move through their links without indexing the "duplicate" content.

...wow. Yeah, you're not kidding. Everything from the domain to "/Link-Exchange" looks so spammy as to be almost comical. If someone showed me that site, I'd tell them it's spam without hesitating.

I'm starting to lean toward killing those links, definitely. It's a tough call, though. Or at least a strange one.

Hi David!

You're getting great advice from Andy and Patrick, but I wanted to add that a site with a spam score of 4 and a DA of 45 is really unlikely to cause you a problem. Rand's initial post on spam score may clarify a bit, but we don't generally flag a link as potentially harmful until it has a score of 5.

I can't guarantee that site is _not _causing harm, but a 45 DA is reasonably solid. Really consider whether you want to risk losing any potential benefits from that link before you get rid of it.