How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
-
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
-
Yep, already implemented. Good point though.
-
Definitely. I start with the 30 day view, then go to YTD, then push the start date back to 1/1/2011. That's my 3 step process every time I'm investigating a situation.
I've seen at least 20 of our sites decline in traffic in the past few months due to the April & June Panda updates. The dates of decline in Webmaster Tools (Traffic > Search Queries) line up perfectly with the various recent Panda updates.
Fixing /tag/ issues is one thing...but we have a monumental task of rewriting massive amounts of product descriptions next. We also have a fair amount of "no-indexing" or canonicalizing to do with our syndicated content. We'll be better for it in the end. I only wish I knew about these situations much sooner.
As I tell everyone, protect your unique content with all you've got...and keep duplicate content nowhere near your site. It's just too risky.
-
Additionally, make sure your posts have rel=canonical.
-
Are you looking at your analytics as far back as early 2011?
I'm come across people who were hit on known Panda update day that weren't aware they were ....as strange as it may sound.
-
Thank you both...and, we're thinking alike. I recently went through our 60+ Wordpress sites addressing the issue of non-indexed /tag/ pages and also ensuring they weren't in the sitemap via our Sitemap plugin.
For the sites that had hundreds or thousands of /tag/ pages, but very little traffic in Google Analytics (Search > Organic w/ Landing Page as "primary dimension")...I just went ahead and set them to "noindex").
For sites where the /tag/ pages were driving a fair amount of traffic (10% of site total or more), I had our editors write unique descriptions for the top 50-100 (like we do with category pages) and then we set the rest to "noindex,follow" via the meta robots tag.
For this one site...I just haven't found an easy solution that didn't leave an uneasy feeling in my stomach. It's tough to give up 25% of your traffic in hopes that Google will get it right and rank your real content higher in place of these /tag/ pages.
Uh oh...I just checked Analytics and or organic traffic started creeping down @ July 13th. When I look at just the /tag/ pages in the organic landing pages section, I see that they dropped in traffic @ 50-60%. Something bad is happening. I am setting them to "noindex" immediately.
Definitely can't wait to read your post. I'll be writing my own on www.kernmedia.com in the near future as well.
-
Looking forward to that post, Dan.
-
Hi
I'm actually going to be addressing this exact question on a post for Moz in the coming weeks - so keep an eye out for that.
But in short, here's what I do;
Analytics
- run a report for landing tag pages (with a filter) - over the last three months
- apply an advanced segment to see google only traffic
- dump the report into a CSV
Webmaster Tools
- view a impressions / clicks report by top pages (not keyword) - also zoom out as far as you can
- filter for web only (not images)
- dump the report into a csv
VLookup in Excel
using a VLookup in excel - combine the two reports matching data to the URLs (you'll end up discarding some non-tag pages from wmt) - the end result will be a master spreadsheet, with the following columns;
- URL
- Impressions
- clicks
- avg position
- visits
- pages/visit
- avg visit duration
- % new visits
- bounce rate
(These are all the default report metrics. I actually prefer a custom landing page report in analytics, but this works fine.)
Analyze
Then, you do your sorting, filtering etc - to decide how valuable the tag traffic has been. In general, you're trying to look for an overwhelming reason for the value add of having those pages in there. they might get visits, but what's onsite behavior? maybe they get visits, but perhaps only from a small handle of tag pages?
In the post I do, I'll cover more about how to analyze this report etc.
As Klarke put so well, the actual posts should rank in their place. Those tend to have better results when people land on those.
Remove
If you decide to remove, do so carefully. Do it on a weekend or just before a downtime. If you use Yoast simply select to noindex tag archives.
Also, rememeber to exclude tags from your XML sitemap.
Then watch webmaster tools etc and watch for their removal.
--- I did this process on a site with 9,000 tag pages in the index and results were very good.
-Dan
-
I would "noindex,follow" them. Don't block them with robots.txt.
With that many pages, you're certainly running the risk of being hit by Panda.Those tag pages shouldn't be ranking, instead the individual posts should be in those positions. If I were you, I would take the chance and do the noindex, with the expectation that Google will appropriately rank the posts in their place.
I'd say those are better odds as against losing 50 - 80% of traffic in a panda update.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Canonical Tag Question Regarding Two State Pages
Hi Moz Fam! Question... we have two pages for each state. Both pages are used in our PPC campaigns. One of the two state pages is fully optimized for organic search. The page that's optimized for organic has 1,500-2,000 words, the other one has thin content. All the content is unique, nothing duplicate. We call one set of state pages that I optimized my SEO state pages, then the other ones are our PPC state pages. Should I be setting a canonical tag to one of these pages to let Google know which one is the "master" page? (My SEO state page is the master) I've never used them, so I'm not sure what the right answer is for this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
SEO on Jobs sites: how to deal with expired listings with "Google for Jobs" around
Dear community, When dealing with expired job offers on jobs sites from a SEO perspective, most practitioners recommend to implement 301 redirects to category pages in order to keep the positive ranking signals of incoming links. Is it necessary to rethink this recommendation with "Google for Jobs" is around? Google's recommendations on how to handle expired job postings does not include 301 redirects. "To remove a job posting that is no longer available: Remove the job posting from your sitemap. Do one of the following: Note: Do NOT just add a message to the page indicating that the job has expired without also doing one of the following actions to remove the job posting from your sitemap. Remove the JobPosting markup from the page. Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 status code). Add a noindex meta tag to the page." Will implementing 301 redirects the chances to appear in "Google for Jobs"? What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grnjbs07175 -
Best way to "Prune" bad content from large sites?
I am in process of pruning my sites for low quality/thin content. The issue is that I have multiple sites with 40k + pages and need a more efficient way of finding the low quality content than looking at each page individually. Is there an ideal way to find the pages that are worth no indexing that will speed up the process but not potentially harm any valuable pages? Current plan of action is to pull data from analytics and if the url hasn't brought any traffic in the last 12 months then it is safe to assume it is a page that is not beneficial to the site. My concern is that some of these pages might have links pointing to them and I want to make sure we don't lose that link juice. But, assuming we just no index the pages we should still have the authority pass along...and in theory, the pages that haven't brought any traffic to the site in a year probably don't have much authority to begin with. Recommendations on best way to prune content on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages efficiently? Also, is there a benefit to no indexing the pages vs deleting them? What is the preferred method, and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
Pages that did NOT 301 redirect to the new site
Hi, Is there a tool out there that can tell me what pages did NOT 301 redirect to the new sites? I need something rather than going into google.com and typing in site:oldsite.com to see if it's still indexed and if it's not 301 redirecting.. I'm not sure if screaming frog can do that. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO0 -
Moving from a static HTML CSS site with .html files to a Wordpress Site while keeping link structure
Mozzers, Hope this finds you well. I need some advice. We have a site built with a dreamweaver template, and it is lacking in responsiveness, ease of updates, and a lot of the coding is behind traditional web standards (which I know will start to hurt our rank - if not the user experience). For SEO purposes, we would like to move the existing static based site to Wordpress so we can update it easily and keep content fresh. Our current site, thriveboston.com, has a lot of page extensions ending in .html. For the transition, it is extremely important for us to keep the link structure. We rank well in the SERPs for Boston Counseling, etc... I found and tested a plugin (offline) that can add a .html extension to Wordpress pages, which allows us to keep our current structure, but has anyone had any luck with this live? Has anyone had any luck moving from a static site - to a Wordpress site - while keeping the current link structure - without hurting any rank? We hope to move soon because if the site continues to grow, it will become even harder to migrate the site over. Also, does anyone have any hesitations? It this a bad move? Should we just stay on the current DWT template (the HTML and CSS) and not migrate? Any suggestions and advice will be heeded. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _Thriveworks0 -
How to avoid too many "On Page Links"?
Hi everyone I don't seem to be able to keep big G off my back, even though I do not engage in any black hat or excessive optimization practices. Due to another unpleasant heavy SERP "fluctuation" I am in investigation mode yet again and want to take a closer look at one of the warnings within the SEOmoz dashboard, which is "Too many on page links". Looking at my statistics this is clearly the case. I wonder how you can even avoid that at times. I have a lot of information on my homepage that links out to subpages. I get the feeling that even the links within the roll-over menus (or dropdown) are counted. Of course, in that case then you will end up with a crazy amount of on page links. What about blog-like news entries on your homepage that link to other pages as well? And not to forget the links that result from the tags underneath a post? What am I trying to get at? Well, do you feel that a bad website template may cause this issue i.e. are the links from roll-over menus counted as links on the homepage even though they are not directly visible? I am not sure how to cut down on the issue as the sidebar modules are present on every page and thus up the links count wherever you are on the site. On another note, I've seen plenty of homepages with excessive information and links going out, would they be suffering from the search engines' hammer too? How do you manage the too many on page links issue? Many thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hermski0 -
Should I use the canonical tag on all my mobile pages?
I've seen flavors of this question asked but did not see the exact response I was looking for. If I have a site at: www.site.com And I am creating a mobile version at: m.site.com (let's say a responsive design is not feasible at this time) And all the content on m.site.com is duplicative of the content on www.site.com What's the best way to handle that from an SEO perspective? Should I put a canonical tag on every mobile page pointing back to the www page? I assume that is better than a 'no index' tag on all pages of the mobile site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hbrown1080