Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Andy Trigg on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/08/2020).

No index (and potentially no follow) on category pages

I want to make proper pages for all my Wordpress categories so that users can see a properly designed page with links to all articles in a category presented in order of importance and usefulness instead of the default big blog-style list in date order.I have categories set to no index (and potentially no follow?) so that all the articles are followed and indexed from the pages I created. Is this a good idea? A bad idea?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Sam Mah: Why would you want an internal link to help search engines to discover those pages?
  • Andy Trigg: Hi Sam. I’m not sure what you mean? Search engines would discover each category page and every article within each category would be on that page as a link. So they would crawl my category pages instead of the Wordpress categories
  • Sam Mah: Andy Trigg, I left out the word - NOT.

    Why would you NOT want an internal link to help search engines to discover those pages?
  • Andy Trigg: Thanks Sam. Search engines would discover all the links just the same. My new static page categories will have exactly the same links as the original wordpress ones. I would only nofollow and noindex the official categories because they will be duplicates of my new categories :)
  • Sam Mah: Andy Trigg, Google has confirmed many times on duplications, and there is no penalty for this If you do not do anything unethical.
  • Andy Trigg: Thanks Sam. My thinking is that they wouldn’t be exact duplications. The Wordpress generated categories would have several pages with h1 headers and excerpts but my fixed page categories would have different text and links. It begs the question which one google would prefer.
  • Michael Martinez: It can work, but updating the pages will be tedious. You might want to look into using a shortcode plugin that creates a list of posts for you by category.

    I use Weaver Show Posts on a few sites.
  • Andy Trigg: Thanks Michael. I don`t write many articles at all so updating would be easy for me.
  • Andy Trigg: Just to demonstrate what I mean here is a link to one of my categories followed by my constructed category page. Both contain links to every article in the category but the second one presents in what I hope is a far better way?

    https://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/category/consumer/
    https://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/consumer-rights-appliances/

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/08/2020).