Category Archives being indexed

#144920
  • Resolved Zaphire

    3 years, 9 months ago

    Rank Math free

    I have recently just seen that Google has indexed a category for example:
    https://www.website.org/category/blog/
    showing an archive page of all my categories, this is just duplicate content. Should I noindex this or does it serve a purpose as a category archive page?

    Can this be noindexed by selecting the following in RankMath’s settings:

    Strip Category Base

    Remove /category/ from category archive URLs. Why do this?
    E.g. example.com/category/my-category/ becomes example.com/my-category

    If i select this will this also mean my website.org/blog/post will show as website/post ?

    I have also already selected the option for:

    Category Archives Robots Meta

    Select custom robots meta, such as nofollow, noarchive, etc. for category archive pages. Otherwise the default meta will be used, as set in the Global Meta tab.

    in Titles and meta so should the website/category/blog page not have been indexed initially?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Michael Davis

    3 years, 9 months ago

    Rank Math pro

    Hello,

    Thank you for getting in touch with us.

    Indexing or noindexing of category pages is entirely dependent. It may have positive SEO effects or negative depending on your Site Content. Please go through this article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/noindex-category-archive-pages/374867/ to help you decide in noindexing or indexing your category pages.

    The option to strip category base in Rank math doesn’t have any effect on indexing of any page. This is used to shorten your URLs. The URL will be still indexed, just the short format without the /category/ part.

    Also this will not affect this URL website.org/blog/post. It would have effect on a URL, for example if the URL was website.org/category/test-category then it would become website.org/test-category.

    To noindex a category page, simply edit the page and set the noindex in the Advanced tab of Rank math meta box.

    The settings in Global meta are used as defaults for new posts/pages. If you made the setting change after the page was already created, this will not have any effect on the existing page.

    Hope that helps and please do not hesitate to let us know if you need our assistance with anything else.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

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