Adding Orphaned Pages to the Google Index
-
Hey folks,
How do you think Google will treat adding 300K orphaned pages to a 4.5 million page site. The URLs would resolve but there would be no on site navigation to those pages, Google would only know about them through sitemap.xmls.
These pages are super low competition.
The plot thickens, what we are really after is to get 150k real pages back on the site, these pages do have crawlable paths on the site but in order to do that (for technical reasons) we need to push these other 300k orphaned pages live (it's an all or nothing deal)
a) Do you think Google will have a problem with this or just decide to not index some or most these pages since they are orphaned.
b) If these pages will just fall out of the index or not get included, and have no chance of ever accumulating PR anyway since they are not linked to, would it make sense to just noindex them?
c) Should we not submit sitemap.xml files at all, and take our 150k and just ignore these 300k and hope Google ignores them as well since they are orhpaned?
d) If Google is OK with this maybe we should submit the sitemap.xmls and keep an eye on the pages, maybe they will rank and bring us a bit of traffic, but we don't want to do that if it could be an issue with Google.
Thanks for your opinions and if you have any hard evidence either way especially thanks for that info.
-
it's not a strategy, it's due to technical limitations on the dev side. i agree though thanks.
So, I asked this question to a very advanced SEO guru and he said they could be seen as doorways and present some risk and advised against it. That combined with the probability that they will most likely get dropped from Google's index anyway and we know that Google says they want pages to be part of the sites architecture has me leaning towards nofollowing all of them and maybe experiment with allowing 1000 to get indexed and see what happens with them.
Thanks for your input folks
-
I'd go back to the drawing board and rework your strategy.
Do you need additional sites? 150K orphaned pages you want indexed sounds spammy or poor site architecture to me.
-
Yikes, I didn't know the site was that big. Still, if you're afraid of how Google would "react" to those orphaned pages, I'd still test small, regardless of how large your overall site is.
-
Yea 1000 is probably a big enough sample.
10,000 seems like a lot i guess but not when you've got a site with 4.5 million pages.
-
yea submitting sitemap.xml files for 300k pages that are not part of the site seems a bit obnoxious.
-
we definitely want the 150k in the index since they are legitimate pages and linked to on the site. it's the 300k of orphaned ones we have to take along as a package deal that i am worried about. too many orphaned pages for Google.
-
That's a good idea. 10,000 Is still a lot. You could even test fewer than 10,000 pages. Why not try 1,000?
-
Hmmm. I am leaning towards the following solution since I would rather be on the cautious side, maybe this makes sense?
a) we noindex these 300k orphaned pages and do not submit sitemap.xml files
b) we experiment with say 10,000 pages and we allow only those to get indexed and submit sitemap.xml files for them
c) we closely monitor their indexing and ranking performance so we can determine if these are even worth opening up to Google and taking any risk.
-
In my opinion, add the 150k pages in the site map along with the 300k pages, let Google index all the pages and once they are all indexed , you can take a call on de indexing the 150k pages based on their traction.
-
I have no hard evidence, but if it were my site, I would do option C but keep an eye on what happens, and if I noticed anything strange happening, I would implement option B. But if option C makes you nervous, I see no reason you couldn't or shouldn't noindex them right off the bat.
That's merely one person's opinion, however.
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
-
I still see the old page in index
Hello, I have done a redirect and still see in google index my old page after 3 weeks. My new page is there also Is it normal that the old page isn't dropped for the index yet ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Why is Google no longer Indexing and Ranking my state pages with Dynamic Content?
Hi, We have some state specific pages that display dynamic content based on the state that is selected here. For example this page displays new york based content. But for some reason google is no longer ranking these pages. Instead it's defaulting to the page where you select the state here. But last year the individual state dynamic pages were ranking. The only change we made was move these pages from http to https. But now google isn't seeing these individual dynamically generated state based pages. When I do a site: url search it doesn't find any of these state pages. Any thoughts on why this is happening and how to fix it. Thanks in advance for any insight. Eddy By the way when I check these pages in google search console fetch as google, google is able to see these pages fine and they're not being blocked by any robot.txt.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap0 -
Why would one of our section pages NOT be indexed by Google?
One of our higher traffic section pages is not being indexed by Google. The products that reside on this section page ARE indexed by Google and are on page 1. So why wouldn't the section page be even listed and indexed? The meta title is accurate, meta description is good. I haven't received any notices in Webmaster Tools. Is there a way to check to see if OTHER pages might also not be indexed? What should a small ecom site do to see about getting it listed? SOS in Modesto. Ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
How Do You Remove Video Thumbnails From Google Search Result Pages?
This is going to be a long question, but, in a nutshell, I am asking if anyone knows how to remove video thumbnails from Google's search result pages? We have had video thumbnails show up next to many of our organic listings in Google's search result pages for several months. To be clear, these are organic listings for our site, not results from performing a video search. When you click on the thumbnail or our listing title, you go to the same page on our site - a list of products or the product page. Although it was initially believed that these thumbnails drew the eye to our listings and that we would receive more traffic, we are actually seeing severe year over year declines in traffic to our category pages with thumbnails vs. category pages without thumbnails (where average rank remained relatively constant). We believe this decline is due to several things: An old date stamp that makes our listing look outdated (despite the fact that we can prove Google has spidered and updated their cache of these pages as recent as 2 days ago). We have no idea where Google is getting this datestamp from. An unrelated thumbnail to the page title, etc. - sometimes a picture of a man's face when the category is for women's handbags A difference in intent - user intends to shop or browse, not watch a video. They skip our listing because it looks like a video even though both the thumbnail and our listing click through to a category page of products. So we want to remove these video thumbnails from Google's search results without removing our pages from the index. Does anyone know how to do this? We believed that this connection between category page and video was happening in our video sitemap. We have removed all reference to video and category pages in the sitemap. After making this change and resubmitting the sitemap in Webmaster Tools, we have not seen any changes in the search results (it's been over 2 weeks). I've been reading and it appears many believe that Google can identify video embedded in pages. That makes sense. We can certainly remove videos from our category pages to truly remove the connection between category page URL and video thumbnail. However, I don't believe this is enough because in some cases you can find video thumbnails next to listings where the page has not had a video thumbnail in months (example: search for "leather handbags" and find www.ebags.com/category/handbags/m/leather - that video does not exist on that page and has not for months. Similarly, do a search for "handbags" and find www.ebags.com/department/handbags. That video has not been on that page since 2010. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SharieBags0 -
How to make Google include our recipe pages in its main index?
We have developed a recipe search engine www.edamam.com and serve the content of over 500+ food bloggers and major recipe websites. Our legal obligations do not allow us to show the actual recipe preparation info (e.g. the most valuable from the content), we can only show a few images, the ingredients and nutrition information. Most of the unique content goes to the source/blog. By submitting XML sitemaps on GWT we now have around 500K pages indexed, however only a few hundred appear in Google's main index and we are looking for a solution to include all of them in the index. Also good to know is that it appears that all our top competitors are in the exactly same situation, so it is a challenging question. Any ideas will be highly appreciated! Thanks, Lily
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edamam0 -
How does google count a menu on each page
Hello, Just wondering how google treats the TOp and bottom menu that you see on each page of a website ? Does it count it on all the pages in terms of link juice, or is it just there for user experience and only what it counts are the links in the content of a page or on the side ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Should pages of old news articles be indexed?
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!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Export list of urls in google's index?
Is there a way to export an exact list of urls found in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0
