Index of blog posts amongst main site

[swaapc]

Does anyone have any idea if it is a good thing or a bad thing to have your blog indexed in and amongst your main site.
Basically we have one of our WP blogs with 1500+ posts located at www.xxxxxxxx/blog. I generate a sitemap that sits in the root directory along with the site map for our web site.
Any suggestions?

 

[dumitru]

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.
So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages.

 

[swirt]

A blog within the main site is fine. It builds a big empire. The only reason I would argue against it is if the blog serves a separate purpose than the main site. (ex: The main site is for a B&B and the blog is a cooking blog.)

 

[swaapc]

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.
So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages..

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.

This could be a problem as I display the first N words of each of the last 10 blogs on a 'blogs' page on the main site and again the first n words of the last blog post on the index page as a 'news' item (fed by an RSS feed).

So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages.

Not sure I fully understand this. Could you explain a little more. I certainly don't disable any indexing on any pages to my knowledge. I use 'Google XML Sitemaps' to generate the site map.
Thanks for the help.

 

[dumitru]

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.
So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages..

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.

This could be a problem as I display the first N words of each of the last 10 blogs on a 'blogs' page on the main site and again the first n words of the last blog post on the index page as a 'news' item (fed by an RSS feed).

So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages.

Not sure I fully understand this. Could you explain a little more. I certainly don't disable any indexing on any pages to my knowledge. I use 'Google XML Sitemaps' to generate the site map.
Thanks for the help.
.

Displaying the first N words is nothing damaging, unless you display the first 100 words and your blog posts have 110 words. If you display the first 20 words out of 300, Google is pretty smart not to penalize you for archive pages.
Well, WordPress automatically creates post archive pages for categories, authors and tags.
So if you are the only author, then the same posts will appear on different archive pages, like
domain.com/author/swaapc/,
domain.com/category/our-news/,
domain.com/tag/news/
For this reason in WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin you have the ability to NOINDEX the author and tag archives, so that you leave just the category archives, which make more sense in terms of everything.

 

[swaapc]

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.
So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages..

I don't see any problems with having your blog indexed, as long as you don't get a duplicate content penalty.

This could be a problem as I display the first N words of each of the last 10 blogs on a 'blogs' page on the main site and again the first n words of the last blog post on the index page as a 'news' item (fed by an RSS feed).

So simply make sure that you disable indexing for your author/tag pages, as they will contain the same thing as your category archive pages.

Not sure I fully understand this. Could you explain a little more. I certainly don't disable any indexing on any pages to my knowledge. I use 'Google XML Sitemaps' to generate the site map.
Thanks for the help.
.

Displaying the first N words is nothing damaging, unless you display the first 100 words and your blog posts have 110 words. If you display the first 20 words out of 300, Google is pretty smart not to penalize you for archive pages.
Well, WordPress automatically creates post archive pages for categories, authors and tags.
So if you are the only author, then the same posts will appear on different archive pages, like
domain.com/author/swaapc/,
domain.com/category/our-news/,
domain.com/tag/news/
For this reason in WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin you have the ability to NOINDEX the author and tag archives, so that you leave just the category archives, which make more sense in terms of everything.
.

Thanks for that. I understand. I will have a look at Yoast.