Questions regarding Site Structure using Wordpress

ridersark said:

Hi,

I am planning to start a new authority site in a niche which can be sub-categorized into a few sub-niches. My intention is to have a tightly knit site using Silo structures for each sub-niche. However, I have a few doubts or maybe misconceptions which I would like to hear your thoughts about,

1. Would you recommend using category or page for sub-niches? Either ways my post url structure will remain the same domain.com/post-name

• If listed Category wise, I will add some unique content to each sub-niche category and WP will populate all the posts of that sub-niche in its specified category. Doing this will cause pagination issue that I mentioned in Question 3.
• If listed Page wise, I will add same unique content and will manually link all the sub-niche posts in that page. This might be easy at the start but going ahead if we reach 1000+ posts then manually linking and updating the sub-niche pages would become a pain point.

2. If I go with the Page wise approach, Should I just noindex category pages. I will be assigning categories for posts in order to pull in related posts etc. Purely for internal organizing.

3. If I go with the Category wise approach, Should I noindex paginated pages in those categories (/page/2 and /page/3 etc).

4. What are your opinions about adding no-follow to about-us, contact, privacy and other filler pages in the Nav or Footer? I'm thinking of making them nofollow because that way the link juice is only directed towards necessary Posts , Pages (or) Categories [depending on the above decision on 1].

@Starblazer , @Nargil , @fasttrak , @splishsplash and other experts are welcome to throw some light

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fb3003 said:

on #4 - you get no benefit from making any of the internal pages as no-follow in menu or footer. take a look at difficult keywords and look at the top ranked pages. you won't find no-follow tags for internal pages.

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hideath said:

Using categories would be much better as WP will internally link the posts to each other (related posts) and would internally link from both categories to posts and posts to categories, making a decent silo overall the website,
pagination pages won't be a problem for real as they do get the rel next and back meta attribute, neither will cause any kind of other problems to google,
deindexing them is simply not necessary, but it's easily doable and won't cause any problems as well, just feel free

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Starblazer said:

Create Categories for sub-niches and let pagination be do-follow. There is no need to make pagination nofollow unless you have any duplicate or no-content pages. The categories pages are also important for silo-structure as the search crawlers can easily find and relate content.

The footer links have less value in comparison to header and top links. There is nothing wrong in making them nofollow if you don't need them in search index. Top brands leave them because people search for their contact details and check pages to know more about them. All of us don't need to follow them. You should consider making affiliate disclosure nofollow. I had an affiliate sites with a disclosure at the very beginning of every post. After a few weeks, my affiliate disclosure page started ranking right next to my home page for the brand keyword. The footer links won't have same importance. So, you can ignore them.

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Nargil said:

Who dares to wake me from my slumber?

Anyways, the way I do it, which is just one of the ways to do that, there's rarely "wrong" and "right" with SEO, everything has its use.

I do not really add content to my category pages. I mostly leave them be with default pagination or create a separate page that basically lists all the articles within that category.

Considering I am not adding any extra content, I always mark the pages as n0index, but I always keep them d0follow for better flow of linkjuice.

Especially if you link those category pages at your homepage, you really want them to be d0follow.

If you are adding content to them, then by all means, keep them both d0follow and indexable.

Regardint about us/contact us, I always mark those as n0index and n0follow. Same goes for the footer "crap" pages.

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