I've recently been hired to revamp a client website that has NOT been well optimized and not ranking. The actual site structure, sitemap, categories and tags in the blog, are all a mess.
There are 122 Categories (they were basically being used like tags, just categorizing things all over the place) and over 2,100 (!!!) tags. Basically keyword spam: authors making tags of any handful of words they felt the article was about. So I know those have to be nuked and completely rebuilt, and in the meantime have noindexed the tag archives and deleted the tags sitemap xml from Google Search Console. So hopefully that alone helps stop Google from crawling and indexing the site as a keyword salad.
But for the categories, they're bad but not completely terribly used across the board. I'd say we could get it down to 20 actual categories and delete the rest. For now, my concern is there are dozens of properly-categorized blog posts under some "good" categories. Overall it's obviously still a mess with over a hundred poorly defined and poorly organized categories. Should I noindex the categories at least for now, and delete the category xml from the GSC sitemaps? Any concern (re: SEO/Google) about a couple hundred posts in "good" categories losing that structure, if the category structure across the board is such a mess?
I kind of assumed noindex them all and blow the whole thing up, just like the tags (then do a new sitemap once it's all rebuilt with a good category+tag structure), but was hesitant to pull the trigger on categories... if I'd see any negative result from that, or if it's a necessity at this point.
[link] [comments]
from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://ift.tt/2NA13fj
Comments
Post a Comment