This article is deprecated! Any technical information refers to software versions that are now obsolete. Please visit the DIYthemes Blog for current updates, or check out the old Thesis Blog for a treasure trove of website marketing insights.
One of the biggest problems with WordPress is the fact that it automatically generates different kinds of archive pages that can be indexed by search engines. From date-based archives (daily, monthly, yearly) to tags to categories, these auto-generated pages all contain duplicate content that doesn’t belong in search engines.
Why is this duplicate content a potential problem? Consider this:
The job of search engines is to index your site’s pages and determine what your site is about. If you have 100 unique article pages, then ideally, search engines should only have to crawl 100 pages to index your site fully.
However, if you’re using categories, tags, and date-based archives (and depending on how overboard you tend to go with categorization and tagging), then you’re going to have at least one additional page per category, per tag, per month, etc.
Now, instead of having 100 pages to index, you may have 600 pages. Considering you only have 100 pages of unique content, forcing a search engine to index 600 pages to determine what your site is about just doesn’t make any sense.
Think of it this way: Would you rather read a 100-page book or a 600-page book that tells the exact same story? Further, which one do you think you’ll understand better? Which will hold your focus better?
The bottom line is that you can use the robots meta tags in Thesis to prevent different types of auto-generated pages from being indexed by search engines. Further, you can extend this control to all the pages of your site by using the robots meta controls on a per-page or per-post basis.
Check out the video above to see how you can use these controls to streamline your site and rank like a ninja!
