Should We Noindex our Category Pages or Just the Sub-Pages or Keep it All Indexed?

[F5K7]

Do you noindex your category pages?

Just found out that Genesis theme is noindexing category pages by default. I am using the category pages in my main menu and it's pretty much the only option to access the articles.

What's best practice here?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Just found out that Genesis theme is noindexing category pages by default.

No, I do not do that and can't really think of any scenario where noindexing all of your category pages would ever make sense.

What I do is make /page/1/ of the categories worth indexing. I add some content (doesn't have to be a lot) to it that interlinks around a bit to keep the PageRank moving around since category pages receive a ton of it from site wide navigation links. This content helps it rank for terms too.

Then I noindex /page/2/ and forward, with all that content replaced with a little notice like "you're on page 5 of the archives, here are some other options." The reason I started noindexing those was because I didn't want to deal with indexation bloat with low quality pages (potential Panda issues).

So typically I like noindex but dofollow on those pages, but recently John Mueller said something about "if a page is noindex long enough we turn the links nofollow." Which is kind of dumb if you ask me but it does change things. I've yet to come up with any sensible action in regards to this new revelation and probably won't change my methods.

If I do change it, I'll make every single category page indexable & dofollow back to /page/999/, but try not to have that many by increasing the number of posts shown on each page drastically, making them more substantial for Google too.