Yes I'm using Yoast. I've made sure that the "exclude categories from index" option is unchecked (it's unchecked by default but I made sure).
With the new site that I'm using categories most heavily on, I've been adding lots of new posts to SOME of the categories. Each post is a product, and I'm categorizing each product by features of the product (size, type, etc) so each time I post a product multiple categories get updated. I haven't gotten to posting a product that fits into every category so far (I have like 51 categories) but there are quite a few that have been hit several times so I would think they should be indexed at least if freshness is an issue.
Yes I include a snippet, though it might even be the full content - the content I have right now is pretty short since I'm just adding the posts now and am gonna go back in later and flesh out the actual content.
Title tags of the posts? Well, they're just the names of whatever product the post is about. Though it's not like they're things like "Shamwow", it's more like... "Lime Green Metal Tractor by John Deere".
Site name after category name - no I don't have this but that's not intentional or anything. I mean, if you're saying that's beneficial for some reason then I'll add it!
I just have all the categories in the side bar for now. My home page just has all of my most recent posts without any regard to category.
Okay I understand what you're doing.
Just an FYI, technically since you are using Wordpress what you are doing is tagging rather than categorising, as a category should be thought of like your sites table of contents and a tag, your site's index words.
Example: You're doing ecommerce so a category would be "Reception Desks" or "Office Desks" and an example of a tag would be "Brown" or "Glass"
For more on this read everything above the fold
here
Onto your issue:
In your specific case it sounds like you're doing quite a tight ecommerce store around a tight theme which is why you've jumped into tagging rather than categorising (there's no real need for categorising if you're only selling one type of thing that comes in different shapes, sizes, colours).
If you think about what I've mentioned then you're not using categories correctly and this could be the issue.
From your site structure, Google knows that you're using Wordpress and what they are seeing is that you have a lot of categories containing the same post. This would not happen with "correct" use of tagging / categorising. Each post would normally only appear in maybe 1 or 2 categories however it could appear in many multiple tags so it could be looking fucked up to Google but I don't think this is your issue because it's unlikely Google gives a shit about correct use of categories / tags mainly because they're not clever enough to be able to tell the difference except maybe in the case I mentioned earlier.
The main issue I can see is that your categories will be very thin, almost none of your category pages will be unique enough at this point because they don't have enough products/ posts listed in them and the content you have is too short if you haven't beefed it up yet.
Google likes brands so it won't hurt to put your site title in your title tags at the end as this is emulation what the big brands do.
Categories in the sidebar will be fine.
My advice is
- fatten up your product descriptions
- add more products so your categories have enough content to get indexed and for Google to care about them
- Give your category pages some meaningful title tags like: "big widgets" "yellow widgets" to give some more context.
- if you have a need for correct use of categories Vs tags then sort it out (for example if your site isn't as tightly themed as I think it is)
- add internal links via blog posts to your category pages
- add a few external while you're at it
- Give your category pages some meaningful title tags like: "big widgets" "yellow widgets" to give some more context.
- put your site title at the end of your title tags for categories and products if you have the space.
