Wordpress Taxonomy

Question

I am creating a Wordpress blog (no live link yet because it's still at a planning stage). I want to set up the following tag structure:

Category 1: Services Tags: Web design, logo design, print design, etc etc.

Category 2: Type of clients Tags: small businesses, large companies

So each post will be tagged with one or more tags from Category 1, and one tag from Category 2.

However, I heard that using more than one Category per post is a bad idea in terms of SEO? But then, how can I go about it? I don't want any SEO penalties, but I will need to somehow categorize each post using these 2 distinct categories. Should I create some custom taxonomies? That seems like an overkill to me. The solution is probably something rather simple but it just escapes me. I'm not very experienced with taxonomies so I'll appreciate any suggestions.

Answer 1

You can still use categories and take away all of the SEO negatives if you use <?php is_category('Type of client') {?><META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"><?php } ?> in the theme's header.php for one of the categories. Where "type of client" is one of the two category names.

The problem is that both category pages will have the same content, so using taxonomies won't really change anything because there will still be duplicate lists of the content.

Telling search engines to only index one of the categories will ensure the second isn't counted as duplicate content.

Answer 2

I concur, as an alternative we create a secondary template for excerpts and archive.php vs the default, which also implements the noindex,follow meta instruction.

This way if links are built to the non indexed pages, they pass their link flow back to the primary permalink (which means you can rank a page for multiple keyword variations from building links one tier away) while still ensuring your site architecture is not leaking like a civ.