Joseph asks: Do blog archives have any SEO value, or do they merely serve as an incidental accumulation of duplicate content? Same question goes for blog “pages”, such as www.someblog.com/page/2/ , which is a page that people go to in order to see previous posts not on the home page.
Blog archives can have a lot of SEO benefit!
If you have category archives, for example, the accumulation of more and more links to relevant content make the category a good content hub. They also provide a natural way for search engines to find their way to old content.
Same thing goes with pages.
However, I’d do three things to ensure you get as much as possible out of date- and category-based archives:
- Show a short teaser of each post, not the whole post, on archive pages.
- Never cross-post into multiple categories. That would create duplication problems.
- Try to publish evenly, both month over month and across categories. If you publish a dozen articles one month and none the next, or a dozen articles in one category and none in another, if could potentially throw off search engines’ effort to rate your site’s relevance or freshness.
Hope this helps,
Ian