Using multiple categories on a post can be beneficial because it allows you to divide up your content into a variety of general sections or think of it as a table of contents for your site. For example, this post is going into my category for Tips & Tricks and WordPress. Categories are there for your readers to help show them what your site is all about.
One note: every post MUST be categorized. You should never have an uncategorized post.
But, the big question is will multiple categories on a single post hurt your SEO?
As with most questions, there’s rarely a quick answer. So, in short, yes and no. Or I could say yes OR no. Let’s see why:
Permalink Structure
If your site is set up as most WordPress sites are with permalinks being written as http://sitename.com/date/postname or just http://sitename.com/postname, then you are ok to use multiple categories. The only way those multiple categories show up is if someone specifically searches http://sitename.com/category/categoryname. Or if you specifically create a custom page for that category to highlight particular topics. (See an example from $5 Dinners that I did here.)
The reason you are safe is because the URL to the post stays the same – there’s only one permalink for that post, thus no duplicate content. If you have it set up differently (i.e. http://sitename.com/categoryname/postname), then it could create duplicate content, resulting in a penalty or ding from Google. Most WP users don’t have it set up that way, so for most of you this won’t be a problem.
How to Exclude Category Archives in the Site Map
If you have a site map or site map plugin (i.e. WordPress SEO by Yoast) then you’ll want to make sure to EXCLUDE category archives from the site map. In Yoast, for example, there’s a section that says “exclude taxonomies” and you would just check the “categories” and “tags” boxes (if you are using multiple tags on a post). This makes it more difficult for Google to find archive pages. Note that this will exclude all categories.
The third option shown above is “Format” which is automatically checked in Yoast. It’s a new feature in WP but most themes haven’t started using it yet. It’s another way to sort your posts, but that’s for another day.
If you want to keep robots from indexing individual categories, then if you have Yoast, you can edit the category itself by choosing the option “always noindex” and “never” include in sitemap. This is under POST<Categories in your WP dashboard.
What are Archive Pages?
Archive pages are a collection of posts from each category and they are already on your site as the actual posts. If Google sees both (the archived pages and original content) then it can look like duplicate content, which is why you want to exclude them in the site map.
What is a Sitemap?
Because I mentioned Sitemaps, I want to address it quickly. Sitemaps are lists of all the content on your site including images. You can submit sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools so that Google has a blueprint of the layout of your site. This makes it easier and faster for Google to index your site (aka put it in the search engines). Everyone should submit a sitemap.
So essentially, if your using the default permalink settings that does not include the category name, then using multiple categories on a post will not hurt your SEO. Just make sure you exclude categories from being indexed.
One final note, if you find that you are adding LOTS of categories to a single post, then you might want to reconsider how your overall categories are set up for your site and use more tags in place of categories. Categories should be set up for your users to have a good experience with your site in being able to find all the content they are seeking under a particular topic.
Thank you so much. Super Informative 🙂
Thank you! This is really helpful. 1 question…if I have something in 2 categories (for instance a post on fitness that’s also promoting a deal on my favorite product) I would put it in both the fitness category and the category for the specific store. If one category is always no index and the other is not, will that cause any problems?
Lesley,
Great question! If you have one post in two different categories, and one is no-index and the other is indexed, then you will not have any problems. The post will be tied to the indexed category, as far as SEO goes.
Thx for this post really nice informations 😉 Motivate me to fix some issues on my website, webmaster tools detected like 60 ^^ Success 😉
I have come to know that having multiple categories for one post can confuse the readers. So, bloggers should post their articles under exactly one category.
an alternate way to avoid duplication is use cannonical (recommended only if you cant change permalink)
“This is under POST<Categories in your WP dashboard." i cant seem to find this option on my wordpress dashboard..im using wp version 4.2.2 at this moment
Are you using Yoast SEO…That piece is added to when you are using the Yoast SEO plugin.
I’m a bit confused by your advice – nofollowing the category archive page isn’t recommended by Yoast on their blog, as they say it’s an important landing page to be used. Am I missing something?
Matt, Great question! It is important, if it’s used correctly. I’ve run across many sites that use the default listing of posts on their archive pages. So on their main page they will have a full post of their latest post, but it will also show the full post on the archive page for that category. Since you have two “pages” that have the same content showing, Google could ding your SEO. Google’s not smart enough yet to know the difference between a page, a post and an archive page. To Google, they are all just web pages.
To your point, if you have an archive page where the content is shown as excerpts, or even just images with the title, then you won’t have any problems and can safely index those pages.
Hey does this advice still hold in 2020? Also what about if you archive pages contain lists of posts with each post in ‘excerpt’ view (image, title and first couple of paragraphs). In this case external SEO site audit tools still flag up archive pages with duplicate content where there are other archive pages with many of the same posts listed on them.
I’m wondering how much to worry about this duplicate content.
While there will be some duplicate content (the snippet), the category page itself will contain many more content elements so that it will outweight the “duplicate” part of the Google search mechanism.
It should not be a problem If you aren’t using categories in permalink.
Hi, Thank you for the informative post. Could you also share the settings for Google XML Sitemaps plugin. I use it and there are some settings I am not that sure of. A detail guide would be very helpful.
Deindexing or noindexing category pages is not something I would recommend with as much gusto as you are here. Category pages that are set up well can certainly help Google contextualize your site better. I also certainly don’t think separate categories for one post is a big enough benefit to trade for noindexing your category pages. I’d say it’s case by case, but to recommend that any and all should just noindex their category pages is pretty gutsy my friend… I think there is more nuance here than you address in this article.
Fair point…SEO and category indexing is a big topic, and not something that it easily discussed in one post. The topic of this post is “Multiple Categories”. You’re right that having category pages help Google contextualize your site. Even if Google doesn’t index them, it’s still contextualized. And for people that have customized their site to show different layouts and content on category pages might benefit from indexing them. For example, most WordPress themes out of the box don’t utilize the Description or content area for categories, which gives them different content, which would benefit from being indexed. However, the majority of users use their theme “as is”, which means the category pages are just a list of their posts in that category. The problem with indexing your category pages in this case is that the content that is on those pages (the posts themselves) already exist on the site on the single post. So you are adding two or more pages to compete for certain keywords. Most of the time with SEO, you want to bring users to a very specific, useful post, and a category archive page is too broad to drill down on anything specific.
Is there a way of selecting to noindex some, but not all category pages? I have one category for guides which I want to have indexed, but multiple product categories which i want to noindex.
If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can edit a category and set individual categories to be no-indexed. Additionally, you can use meta tags to indicate no-indexing.
HI! Great article. I have some confusion here. Why if I write an article suppose on ‘YouTube TV mode’ and I put two categories for it. One is YouTube and the other is TV. Can this not create duplicate pages. For instance, http://www.mysite.com/categories/tv and http://www.mysite.com/categories/youtube will be duplicate pages and it will both redirect to that same ‘YouTube TV mode’ article. Will this not confuse Google? How can I avoid this?
Your category pages should contain multiple posts on there. If it’s just the one post, you might want to rethink if you actually need this category. Because they will be a collection of posts, this should NOT trigger a duplicate content error because the category page will just contain the snippet of the actual post, while the post page will contain all of the content.
Additionally, if you have a post in two categories, the categories themselves should not be similar, as you shoudl have different posts assigned to each one. If the same posts are assigned to the same category, you should consider consolidating the categories to one, since you don’t want two category pages that have the same posts in them.
thanks for this – very helpful 🙂 le
thanks for the post about category info …
Very useful topic.
I’m blogging for last 8 years and making money every month.
But I never had good knowledge about categories and now I started to learn.
Thanks for the information and I learned something here as well.
Hi
Thank you for posting such a helpful post,i have couple of questions if you can answer very grateful of you
i have products suitable for two categories like Women Leather Vest & Women Leather Waistcoat..?if i add same product in both categories dose this cause any issue to my website..?
is canonical urls the suitable option to any suggestions from your side are very appreciatedÂ
Your category pages should only include the image and an excerpt, not the full item. There won’t be duplicate content because the actual single product will have all the information, and the category page itself will just contain a snippet of it (along with snippets of the others).