What are "content archives"

Content archives (or just "archives") is technical jargon that is no longer relevant in 2019 and beyond. The only type of archive that is used or supported are the
categories.

We no longer refer to anything as "archives".

From a technical standpoint, WordPress "content archives" are types of pages that list posts. This includes:

• category archives
• tag archives
• author archives
• date archives

This is because they all behave roughly the same: display a sequence of posts. How they differ is in what order they display them: by category, by tag, by author or by date.

However, modern recipe sites don't use anything aside from category archives. This is because people do not enjoy scrolling endlessly through uncurated lists of posts. This isn't 2009 anymore, folks.

Therefore, we no longer refer to anything as "archives" - we just noindex tag archives, author archives and date archives in Yoast and pretend they don't exist, by never linking to them. See: SEO for food bloggers

Doing this helps you "weed" your content garden, removing low-value content, which helps search engines (and users) discover your actual useful content. For more information, see should I remove content?

The only type of "archive" you should be concerned with is categories. We've written extensive tutorials on how to configure and use categories:

• How to use categories
• Category pages need content
• How to configure the category pages
• Food blog site structure
• Simple Category Index

You'll notice that you have to put in a lot of manual effort into building category pages that are useful for visitors and search engines.

Automated building and linking of other archives isn't just not recommended anymore, it's actively harmful to your site's quality by diluting internal link equity, wasting "crawl budget" and distracting users from the more useful content.

As of Genesis 3.2.0, we recommend removing the Entry Meta (below content) area.

Using other archives

The other archives may have a useful role depending on your specific use-case. In that case, we recommend hiring an SEO expert to give you specific guidelines on how to use

For 99% of recipe sites, this would be a waste of time and is not necessary. Ever.

Only sites that can afford to hire an SEO expert for guidance specific to their site should worry about archives. And likely, you have 12+ months of other optimization work to do before this becomes useful.