(Entry was posted by Joanna Jana Laznicka on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/11/2019).

What to index and not to index in WP

I constantly see conflicting data even from seasoned SEO`s on what to index and not index in WP with a site that is a publication, which has over 100+ authors and reader use the tags to find the right topics. - What do index and not index regarding authors, tags and or categories?.

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YOUR ANSWERS

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

Michael Martinez: There is no single correct answer to your question. It comes down to what you want to see in the search results. Personally, on a multi-author site I would want to be able to find those authors` profile pages (index archives) in a major search engine. I sometimes search for writers that way. But on a single-author site it seems silly and redundant to allow the author index, which is exactly the same as the main site index, to be crawled and shown in search results. But if the site is publishing full posts on archive index pages it`s probably better to use "noindex" on them. The SEO decision must support the business decision and the business decision cannot be "whatever is best for SEO" because in this case there is no "best for SEO" scenario.
Joanna Jana Laznicka: This is how I feel and think. so glad to see I am thinking the same.
Stockbridge Truslow: Agree 100%. You can`t get a consensus because every scenario is different. If authorship is a useful way to organize things and serves as a useful entry point - then index it. If specific categorization of posts is useful, index those too (or instead of). If not - then don`t.
Yuliana Kronrod: Tags can also be indexed to improve discoverability if the content - I confirmed this with J. Mueller in a conversation prior to a webmasters hangout.