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.

Hi spirituality,

in general, you're absolutely right: existing links should keep on working even after bigger updates on a website. And all vital links on Wizzley are still fully in tact or are redirected correctly.

Redirecting each and every link is feasible for smaller websites, but it can get quite difficult for larger projects like Wizzley. It sure is possible, but it involves a larger portion of code, that is harder to maintain and work with in future updates. Also, those particular redirects involve rather resource consuming server operations. And we consider having a fast loading site one of the really important factors - both for readers and authors.

Just recently, Google has (again) removed several of their services and - since it fits quite well here, too - I'd like to quote one of their statements:

"Technology has the power to change people’s lives. But to make a difference, we need to carefully consider what to focus on, and make hard decisions about what we won’t pursue. This enables us to devote more time and resources giving you products you love, and making them better for you."

As far as I can tell, the mentioned category links are used realllllly rarely on the web - and thus, will not result in heaps of 404s. Google and other search engines were never allowed to index those URLs; even more so: they are not granted access to them, since they are blocked via robots.txt. If you can show us, however, that there are really a lot of such links pointing to the old URLs (that cannot be changed by you or us), we certainly will consider including those redirects.

Cheers :)

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. 

In contrast to what worked well years ago in SEO, today, Google really doesn't like crawling over tons of lists containing basically always the same content - only filtered or ordered in different ways.

We allow Google access to the list of all articles, of course. However, filtering this list by different criteria and showing it to Google as "different content" is against Google's recommendation - and constitutes a waste of their resources (crawling is expensive) and - in the worst case - is a kind of duplicate content.

Google does not want to show such lists in their SERPs, since there's hardly any value for readers on it. Google intends to show the informative articles directly.

@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

It's quite common practice on many *really* large websites, like stackoverflow.com. Some block Google from such pages, others don't. Blocking is rather the modern way to do it, since Google clearly recommends it in the meantime.