WordPress generates archive pages automatically, and it generates a lot of them.
One per category. One per tag. One per author. One per month, and one per year. Plus a paginated version of each once you pass ten posts.
On a blog with 100 posts and 60 tags, that's easily 200-plus URLs containing no original content — just lists of excerpts that already exist elsewhere on your site.
Some of those are worth indexing. Most aren't. Here's how to tell them apart.
The short version
| Archive type | Default position |
|---|---|
| Category | Index — if you use categories deliberately and add real intro content |
| Tag | Noindex on most sites |
| Author | Noindex on single-author sites |
| Date (month/year) | Noindex, almost always |
| Paginated (page 2+) | Index with noindex, follow, or leave to your plugin's default |
The underlying test: would someone search for this page, and would they be satisfied by what's on it?
Why this matters at all
Two reasons, and the second one has become more important.
Thin content dilutes your site. A tag page listing two post excerpts adds nothing a search engine wants. If a meaningful share of your indexed URLs are pages like that, it shapes how Google assesses your site's overall quality.
Archives compete with your actual posts. This is the sharper problem. A tag page for "email deliverability" and your pillar post about email deliverability are both targeting the same term. That's cannibalisation, and you built it by accident. The wider problem.
What this isn't: a duplicate content penalty. Google doesn't penalise you for archives. It just picks one version and ignores the rest, which means your signals end up split across pages you didn't intend to rank.
Category archives: the one worth indexing
Categories are the archive type with a genuine case for indexing — conditional on you actually using them properly.
Index them when:
You have a small number of meaningful categories — five to ten, not forty.
Each category represents a real topic someone might search for.
You've added genuine introductory content to the category page. Most SEO plugins let you write a description that renders above the post list.
The category page functions as a legitimate landing page for that topic.
Noindex them when:
You have dozens of overlapping categories.
The pages are bare lists of excerpts with no original text.
You have a pillar page targeting the same term — in which case the pillar should win, and the category shouldn't be competing with it.
The practical version for most personal-brand sites: if you're running a pillar-and-cluster structure, your pillar pages are your topic landing pages. The category archive duplicating that role is competition you don't need. Noindex the categories and let the pillars work.
Tag archives: noindex, usually
Tags are where the thin-content problem lives, because WordPress makes creating them frictionless and people create them liberally.
The typical pattern: 80 tags across 100 posts, most tags applied to one or two posts, several tags that are near-synonyms of each other and of your categories.
Each generates a page. Almost none of them are pages anyone would search for or be satisfied by.
Noindex tags unless you're running something like a large recipe or product site where tags function as genuine faceted navigation with real user demand — "gluten-free," "under 30 minutes" — and each tag page has substantial content behind it.
Worth doing alongside the noindex: actually tidy your tags. Delete ones applied to fewer than three posts, merge near-duplicates. It won't change rankings much, but it makes your site coherent and it's a fifteen-minute job.
Author archives
Single-author site: noindex, or disable entirely. Your author archive is an exact duplicate of your blog index — same posts, same order, different URL. There's no scenario where indexing both helps.
Multi-author site: a genuine judgement call. If your authors are recognised names whose work people seek out, an author archive is a legitimate page and worth indexing. If authorship is incidental, noindex.
One thing to keep regardless of indexing: a real author page with a bio, credentials, and links. That's your Person entity and it matters for E-E-A-T and for entity resolution, whether or not the archive of their posts is indexed. Those are different pages doing different jobs. Why.
Date archives
Noindex, essentially always. Also consider disabling them entirely.
Nobody searches for "everything published on this site in March 2024." They're pure WordPress artefact — a feature from when blogs were chronological diaries rather than topic libraries.
Most SEO plugins have a single toggle to disable date archives, which redirects them rather than leaving thin pages sitting there.
Paginated archives
yoursite.com/blog/page/2 and onward.
The standard handling: noindex, follow. That keeps the thin pages out of the index while still letting Google follow the links on them to discover your posts — which matters, because on a large blog, pagination is a genuine discovery route.
Most SEO plugins do something sensible here by default. Not worth agonising over.
What you should check: that paginated pages aren't inheriting identical titles and meta descriptions from page one. Most plugins append "Page 2" automatically; verify yours does.
How to actually set this
In your SEO plugin, under Search Appearance (Yoast), Titles & Meta (Rank Math), or the equivalent:
Taxonomies tab → set Categories and Tags to index or noindex.
Archives tab → set Author and Date archives, and find the option to disable them outright if you want.
Then verify. Load a tag page, view source, and search for noindex. Don't trust the toggle without checking — this is exactly the kind of setting that silently fails to apply.
And check your sitemap. If you've noindexed tag archives, they shouldn't be in your XML sitemap. Listing a page as important while telling Google not to index it is a contradictory signal. Most plugins sync this automatically; verify rather than assume.
The one thing not to do
Don't noindex everything reflexively and stop thinking about it.
Archives are a symptom, not the disease. If you have 80 thin tag pages, the fix isn't only hiding them from Google — it's using tags more deliberately in future, and consolidating what's there.
Noindexing solves the search visibility problem. It doesn't solve the "my site's information architecture is chaotic" problem underneath, and that one affects real readers too.
Frequently asked questions
Do tag pages hurt SEO?
They can, in two ways. Thin tag pages — listing one or two post excerpts with no original content — add low-value URLs to your indexed footprint, which shapes how Google assesses site quality overall. More directly, a tag page targeting the same term as one of your actual posts competes with it, splitting signals between pages you'd rather consolidate. Noindexing tags resolves both on most blogs.
Should category pages be indexed?
Yes, if you use categories deliberately and give each one genuine introductory content that makes it a legitimate landing page for that topic. No, if you have dozens of overlapping categories producing bare lists of excerpts, or if you have pillar pages already targeting those terms — in which case the category archive is competing with your own pillar.
What about author archives?
On a single-author site, noindex or disable them — the author archive duplicates your blog index exactly, same posts in the same order at a different URL. On a multi-author site, index them if your authors are recognised names people seek out. Either way, keep a proper author bio page with credentials and profile links, since that serves entity recognition regardless of whether the post archive is indexed.
What to do next
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and look at what's indexed.
If you see tag and date archives in the results, you've found low-value pages competing with your actual content. That's a settings change taking about five minutes in your SEO plugin.
Then check your sitemap contains only what you've chosen to index — the two should agree.
Free: The WordPress maintenance checklist.
Related guides
- WordPress SEO: setup, settings and the traps — where this sits in setup
- Keyword cannibalization — archives competing with posts
- Why isn't my page indexed? — if the noindex went somewhere unintended
- Internal linking and topic clusters — pillars as topic landing pages
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Written by
Muhammad Basim
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