Indexing blog content without a massive list of archive months

[HoosierBuff]

Hi all,

I'm looking for suggestions here. I have a client that has roughly 16 pages of "main" site content, 36 blog posts, and then about 75 tag/date/author/category pages to support the 36 blog posts. Right now there is a list of about 25-30 archive months in the blogs right sidebar, 12 ish tags, 20 categories and 5 authors.

Should I just eliminate the date archives and tags, just use the categories?

 

[Eric Rohrback]

What's the purpose for the change? What's the indication you need to cut those pages down?

 

[HoosierBuff]

Good question Eric,

1. I think UX wise, having 30 month links on the page isn't great.
2. I had recently read a presentation from moz about being more careful with internal linking. I think creating 30 "month" pages just wastes link equity.

 

[Greg Schueler]

Google likes site that are user friendly (they make sense to the end user).
Having a list of month-archives plays no benefit to the user. they don't know what happened in what month, they look for headlines (maybe categories). No one ever goes to a site and thinks," oh, let's see what happened in October 2015 and if there are any interesting articles back then". But if they saw a headline (from October) that said "38 ways to bla bla bla" and they were interested in bla bla bla, that would be a good benefit and click worthy.

If Categories and Tags are used properly, they can be good for a user too. If they are generic and each article hast 3-10 categories that are nothing more than keyword spam, then they are of no use.