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    4. Should pages of old news articles be indexed?

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    Should pages of old news articles be indexed?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • theLotter
      theLotter last edited by

      My website published about 3 news articles a day and is set up so that old news articles can be accessed through a "back" button with articles going to page 2 then page 3 then page 4, etc... as new articles push them down.  The pages include a link to the article and a short snippet.

      I was thinking I would want Google to index the first 3 pages of articles, but after that the pages are not worthwhile.  Could these pages harm me and should they be noindexed and/or added as a canonical URL to the main news page - or is leaving them as is fine because they are so deep into the site that Google won't see them, but I also won't be penalized for having week content?

      Thanks for the help!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • gcdtechnologies
        gcdtechnologies @theLotter last edited by

        Ah I'm sorry I misinterpreted you - so it's essentially about pagination? Rel Next/Rel Previous is probably the best way to go - the first page will be given the equity and the pages won't have to compete with each other for ranking. Google have a pretty comprehensive guide: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • theLotter
          theLotter @gcdtechnologies last edited by

          Thanks Alice, but my question is about the page where the article is linked from not the actual article itself ( which 100% is staying indexed )

          gcdtechnologies 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • gcdtechnologies
            gcdtechnologies last edited by

            Hi Sara,

            If the articles are time sensitive but high quality, I wouldn't noindex them. They could still have value in the future (for example, if a related story comes up, you can link back to the old article). You might also find ways to refresh or recycle them, such as adding a follow up, updating the information, or promoting a really great post "From Our Archives". They could also be a good longtail source of traffic for people looking for information on past news/events.

            Google will be able to index old and outdated articles, but it's smart enough to know that these posts are old and outdated and therefore won't assign big chunks of page rank to them.

            However if the articles are low quality, I would take action to improve the good content/poor content ratio. The ideal situation would be to improve the articles themselves, but that might not be a feasible solution if you've been publishing three per day for an extended period of time. I would conduct a thorough audit to see what content could be saved/improved and what content should be deleted. I wouldn't bother with no index or canonicals - if it's good content leave it up and let it be indexed, and if it's bad content that can't be saved, remove it.

            Finally if you are redirecting old articles, I would be careful about where they redirect to. Ideally you'd want to redirect from a low quality article to a high quality article on the same subject. A big increase in URLs pointing to the main news page could raise a red flag, and could force readers to look for information unnecessarily.

            Good luck!

            theLotter 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • theLotter
              theLotter @Gamer07 last edited by

              The news articles themselves are not thin content, but the general pages are relatively thin because they only consist of the link + snippet.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • Gamer07
                Gamer07 last edited by

                Are they all thin content? If not, then I don't think it's necessary to NOINDEX them. If you think some of them don't have any real value, you could specifically NOINDEX them(and not all together). Google will crawl those pages no matter how deep they are, as long as they are accessible.

                theLotter 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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