Christian Categories

Well, both 'bible study' and 'Catholicism' already have two articles in there, so I doubt they'll be promoting Paganism much longer ;) 

BTW - I'm personally not too happy that the old category URL's now return 404's. I'm not thrilled they disappeared, but them not even redirecting to the new ones is just sad. It means that links like the one in the first post in this thread no longer work - bad SEO. 

I think Simon is working on that. We just had a big SEO analysis session last week, where we found some stuff that needs fixing.

You block search engines from the category URLs? Seriously? Well, that's definitely not something I would personally recommend. However, this is getting way off topic and you have an SEO firm consulting - and it's not me, so I won't but in more. 

But yes- I realize redirecting everything is tough and I have no indication at all that there are loads of people linking to those URLs (you obviously have access to that data, I don't). However, I might be tempted to link to categories myself - and I guess I won't now that I realize you all aren't even letting them be seen by search engines. From my perspective that makes the site a bit less valuable as a link SOURCE though. I'll have to think about it. 

@Spirituality & Simon

I do the same on my own sites, all tag, category, archive ect pages are set to 'dofollow, noindex' for exactly the reasons Simon mentioned. I do want my single articles to rank for the keyword in question and not having to compete with the tag and/or category page. SY