Basic SEO noindex question

I would be really careful with the noindex tag…
These are the ones you could noindex:
search, tag and error pages
However, I’m not using the noindex tag at all.

Personally, from an SEO standpoint, I’d be more worried about your URL structure /?p=123 than whether or not to noindex pages. Google can deal with duplicate content issues quite intelligently these days, especially when it comes to WordPress.

You’ll get a lot more leverage in search by changing your url structure to something more legible than query parameters than no-indexing pages. I tend to use a custom structure for blog posts /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html but whatever works for you is best.

As for noindexing, Panther8 is correct, although I wouldn’t noindex error pages myself, because Google won’t index those anyway (unless they’re sending an incorrect response code, ie 200 instead of 404).

SpaceDogDeveloper is on spot! by implementing your custom link structure you can get the keywords of the titels of your articles into the URLs!

(You can change the link structure via Settings – Permalinks and then adding for example “/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%” )

i am worried that changing my url structure will destroy the page rank for my site. Wont it break the links to thousands of sites who already link to my images? Many of my images have been number one in google image search for 5 years. Some days I get 4000 hits from google alone. my site is macmcrae.com

Oh, I thougth you would have a relatively new blog. If you say you have thousands of sites I wouldn’t make these changes.

thanks for the replies guys. I see there is a plugin that will redirect the google bot but I don’t trust it. something tells me it will break and google will end up killing me.

Yes, DON’T use a Googlebot redirection! That’s very bad.. but, if you’re worried about your URLs, usually WordPress 301’s the old query string to the new permalinks. If that isn’t working for you, I highly recommend the Redirection Plugin for WordPress. Works like a charm for me.

But yeah, if you’re pages are already indexed, there’s not a huge value to renaming the URLs, as you will lose PR through a 301.