WordPress Category vs Post SEO

Hello Friends, in an old Google webmaster video they had mentioned best practice is to rank posts only and noindex category & tags.
I am doubting this and kinda confused.. the post appears in both category list + tag list.
So if I enable category indexing the same post will be indexed through category + post level.

What's the best SEO for this situation?

LX911 said:

So if I enable category indexing the same post will be indexed through category + post level.

Click to expand...

I don't understand this question...

But what I think you're asking is whether the post gets indexed (by google) if you enable indexation for categories. And this is false, as in, you can (and should) allow google to index your categories, but this doesn't mean that the posts under those categories will get indexed too. It might work for big sites that google trusts and likes, but for everyone else this is not true..

LX911 said:

Hello Friends, in an old Google webmaster video they had mentioned best practice is to rank posts only and noindex category & tags.

Click to expand...

the best practice is to rank both the categories and the posts. The more URLs you have indexed the more traffic you can theoretically get, so try to index both if they're important...

Regarding tags... Tags don't always rank (I've seen some of them rank, but rarely), so you can noindex them. You can smartly use tags to help people better navigate your site, or to find relevant content that might be hidden / hard to find otherwise. So, in a sense, tags are important for UX which eventually improves your SEO indirectly, but they don't need to be indexed to do their magic

tazarbm said:

the best practice is to rank both the categories and the posts. The more URLs you have indexed the more traffic you can theoretically get, so try to index both if they're important...

Regarding tags... Tags don't always rank (I've seen some of them rank, but rarely), so you can noindex them.

Click to expand...

This is your answer OP and that's what I personally do.
Just make sure you use post excerpts.

Thanks @tazarbm my main query was on that factor of 1 post appearing once through the post URL and also through the category URL
but as @praetserge mentioned using excerpts only in categories will work in favor of avoiding the duplication.

Thanks to both!

LX911 said:

@praetserge mentioned using excerpts only in categories will work in favor of avoiding the duplication.

Click to expand...

Yes, to avoid duplicate content and for convenience/better UX (you don't really want users to scroll through your posts).