Why You Must Avoid Posting Under Multiple Categories In Your Blog

| November 23, 2009 | Comments (13)

multiple categories
This must be the most easily committed mistake by most of the bloggers around the globe, choosing multiple categories for the content to be filed under while publishing an article.

We do not realize the possible consequence of doing this, sometimes if you do it frequently it might get your blog to be penalized. So why it might lead to such a threat? reason is when you post an content and choose multiple categories for it to go under, it means same post exists in multiple locations of your blog.

For example if you are making a post with “how to run your blog” and including it under two categories like “BLOG TIPS” and “BLOG RESOURCES” when search engines crawl through this two categories and it find the same content in two locations then it considers one of it to be a duplicate content.

We normally think that duplicate content will lead your site to be penalized only when the same content is present in different domains but this assumption is wrong, if search engines keep find that similar contents are present in multiple locations in the same site then it will treat it as a duplicate content too and if it finds the case to be same for multiple instances then there is a high possibility that your blog will be penalized for duplicate content and drop your rankings in search engines. When it happens you might think you did nothing wrong, you wrote your own contents but still when don’t use your own written contents properly it might still prove to be threat for penalization.

Tags: ,

Category: Blog Seo

About Chakkravarthi: runs and maintains seoyourblog.com, he has written many articles concerning various topics including blogging, SEO and wordpress SEO. Feel free to subscribe to our RSS Feeds to receive the latest post updates. View author profile.

  • http://kids-theme-parties.com Elsie

    Thank you so much for this post! I did a post a few weeks back and because it included quite a few different topics, I actually posted it under different categories. I am on my way now to change it.

    I found your blog from a link in one of Jackie Lee’s posts and I am really glad I clicked through to your blog. I still sometimes have trouble in working/understand WordPress and I see that I will be able to find answers here on your blog to many of the questions I still have.

    Regards
    Elsie
    .-= Elsie´s last blog ..Kids Party Ideas – Easy Fruity Yogurt Ice Lollies =-.

    • seoguy

      That’s really nice to know, feel free to contact me through contact form in need help section, if you need any personal assistance.

      Happy blogging.

  • http://www.cdtech.in Godwin Sam Josh

    This post really helped me a lot!! Actually I was going on doing this mistake and didn’t realized the effect!!I’ll rectify it and thanks so much.All credit goes to you and your wonderful post.
    Hope to get lot more in through your available and upcoming posts!

  • http://mattdunlap.org Matt Dunlap

    I’m re-organizing my website and what to use multiple categories for posts. I understand how multiple categories affect SEO, but there has to be a way because multiple categories make blogs better. I’m thinking about making a robot.txt file that disallows robots from indexing certain categories… What do you think?

    • seoguy

      disallowing indexing of certain categories would be a good idea, if you intend to use multiple categories for your posts, but you need to certain which categories you don’t want to be indexed and stick to it, otherwise there is a possibility some posts of yours might not get indexed.

      So plan well ahead and stick to your plan that should do the trick :)

      Good luck and best regards

    • http://www.highswisswatches.com/ ray

      i disallow google indexed all of my categories and tags from my blog.only home page and posts be indexed. it’s useful :)

  • Steve

    Are you sure about this – post content is already duplicated on blogs – once under the actual post – and again in the category ….

    • seoguy

      adding no-index to your tags and categories will help to fight the problem of the kind of duplicate issue you just mentioned.

  • http://www.theulinvilla.com Seminyak villas

    I know now that duplicate content can reduce website’s ranking. thx for your information.

  • http://rantsnrascals.com JP @ Rants n’ Rascals

    I came across your post and it’s good but I have a question. I run a parenting site where I host product reviews and giveaways, many other mom bloggers do this and I see in their labels they have the same post labeled under reviews, giveaways and their page rank is like 3 and 4. How are they managing this? when you click reviews you see the review and giveaway and when you click giveaway you see the same post. They do this because sometimes we only do reviews and other times we do a review and giveaway together for products.

    I’d like to know a work around or how they are not losing their page rank by posting under multiple categories. Thanks!

    • seoguy

      You don’t lose pagerank for linking. But how ever having two same posts under different categories will sometimes be seen as duplicate. One easy way to avoid this problem is adding a no-index tag to all the categories that way your categories won’t be indexed by search engines but your posts however be included in the index.

      So when your categories are not indexed you can have your posts under multiple categories without any issues.

      SEO Ultimate plugin has this feature built in to it, under meta robot tags option which makes the job really easier to avoid duplicate content issues.

      Hope that helps you. Let me know if you have any other questions regarding this.

      Regards

  • http://searchdominica.com Dominica

    I have a site searchdominica.com ; that have and area for featured post, now when every i do a post and i think its important i usually click on the category name “featuredpost” and as a result it appears on the front page of the site and in its main category.

    My Question is , How can i post special article excerpts to my front page and have them in only one category ??

  • http://www.schoolselekt.com elina

    Really useful post. Now I need to change all of my posts and keep them under only category