truth vs fiction about categories

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

I stick to one category per post because I read that otherwise it creates duplicate content (same post under different categories), which is apparently seriously bad for SEO. Is that the end of the story?

I notice often around 4 different “Topics” listed on your blog, RawTop, and assume those are “Categories”? Not trying to target you, just an example. Or is this not the same?

If I have to use only one category per post, then fine. But it really is doing a big disservice to the content on my blog and to the surfer. For example, often posts fit under different popular categories. If I have a Latin Bodybuilder who is Hairy, I have three distinct categories: Latin men, Bodybuilders, Hairy Men. So it goes under one. Surfers clicking on the Latin men category to see what my site has to offer about Latin men will, therefore, find a misrepresentation, and only a speck of what the site has on most categories.

If the bottom line is the duplicate content is worse, I just want to know that. Or what your thoughts are on this.

#2

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

Do porn blogs really get that much traffic from search engines? I think you have to check your stats if you’re really getting that much traffic from them.

I derive 80% of my traffic from blog referrals and site directories so I place my content on as many categories as possible. I can also see that I get a fair number of sales across those categories.

#3

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

great question. I can’t imagine amazon.com gets penalized for having books under multiple categories like “bargain books” and a “romance”. I’m anxious to hear what people say.

#4

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

Like almost anything to do with SEO, a lot is guesswork.

For me, I prefer one main category, then use the ‘tags’ to further make the post accessible to searches. Course you could also add sub categories to the main, but i’d rather not have a cluttered navigation.

It comes down, imho, to risk. If you can avoid a risk, why not?

So my choice is to avoid a possible risk to duplicate content, and use just one single category.

my 2 cents

#5

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

The blog posts wouldn’t be duplicate, you would only have one perma entry, however blogs do create lots of bad extra duplicate listing pages. You would often have a blog listed on category pages, date archives and any other archives you might have.

Google etc are quite good at figuring out blogs though so don’t worry about it too much. It’s the individual posts you don’t want to have duplicates of.

Personally I use only a single category for each entry on GayDemon. But different tags.

#6

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

Is the following right? I think you mean that a post is in many places such as under a category, in the archives, under each tag, when someone does a search with their own keywords, and so forth. If so, this is why having more than one category for a post would be the same thing and not matter. It would just be another place the post is listed.

This is how I do it now, and am wondering if anyone thinks this is strange, would cause some problem with SE’s or surfers. For example, I have a category called “Smooth Muscle” and a tag called “Smooth Muscle.” If a post should go under the categories “Latin Men” and “Smooth Muscle,” and I pick “Latin men” for the category, I use a tag called “Smooth Muscle.” It think this is dumb, but that at least that post will show up somewhere when people look for “smooth muscle,” whether from a category or tag. Otherwise, most of my smooth muscle posts would not show up unless someone took time to write “smooth muscle” in the search box.

[QUOTE=gaydemon;72418]The blog posts wouldn’t be duplicate, you would only have one perma entry, however blogs do create lots of bad extra duplicate listing pages. You would often have a blog listed on category pages, date archives and any other archives you might have.

Google etc are quite good at figuring out blogs though so don’t worry about it too much. It’s the individual posts you don’t want to have duplicates of.

Personally I use only a single category for each entry on GayDemon. But different tags.[/QUOTE]

#7

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

[QUOTE=tim;72323]I stick to one category per post because I read that otherwise it creates duplicate content (same post under different categories), which is apparently seriously bad for SEO. Is that the end of the story?

I notice often around 4 different “Topics” listed on your blog, RawTop, and assume those are “Categories”? Not trying to target you, just an example. Or is this not the same?[/QUOTE]

Good question and the answer isn’t going to be what you might think… I personally believe (and my experience backs me up) that duplicate content is fine IF it’s on the same site and the context is clearly defined.

What that means is if I’ve got a hairy daddy fucking a smooth twink I would put it in “hairy”, “daddy”, “smooth” and “twink” categories. I’d also have tags for the name of the site, the name of each performer, etc. So we’re looking at a minimum of 7 categories and tags plus the post page itself, plus the home page of the site, etc. That’s potentially a lot of duplicate content.

Now, my next rule is that each concept should have one and only one indexable page on your site. That means I let spiders crawl whatever they want, but don’t let them index anything but one page per concept. This limits the amount of duplicate content since as soon as something gets pushed to page 2 of the category or tag it’s not duplicate content any more. In case you’re wondering how I do that… I put the following PHP code in the < head> tag (in header.php).

<?php if (is_day()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } elseif (is_month()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } elseif (is_year()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } elseif (is_search()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } elseif (is_author()) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } elseif (stripos($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'],"/page/")) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } elseif (isset($_GET['paged']) && !empty($_GET['paged'])) { ?>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php } ?>

One other thing is to work on having good category and tag names that clearly define the context of the page. The name of the game is to define a concept with a good page title and then have the other elements on the page support that concept. If you do that, you’ll do fine…

[QUOTE=dean.stimson;72327]Do porn blogs really get that much traffic from search engines? I think you have to check your stats if you’re really getting that much traffic from them.

I derive 80% of my traffic from blog referrals and site directories so I place my content on as many categories as possible. I can also see that I get a fair number of sales across those categories.[/QUOTE]

I’m just the opposite. I get 80% of my traffic from just Google.

#8

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

i checked this month = 76% Search Engine Traffic

#9

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

Thanks, Rawtop. I am going to write to you about this. Things are so busy I don’t know when, but I will. :cool:

#10

Re: truth vs fiction about categories

[QUOTE=dean.stimson;72327]Do porn blogs really get that much traffic from search engines? I think you have to check your stats if you’re really getting that much traffic from them.

I derive 80% of my traffic from blog referrals and site directories so I place my content on as many categories as possible. I can also see that I get a fair number of sales across those categories.[/QUOTE]

I thought of this post while checking my stats today. I started a new blog last week that gets 100% of it’s traffic from google search traffic. Of course, it has only had 5 unique visitors, but it’s on the right track. lol