Can you have too many NOINDEX meta tags?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

Our magento store has a lot of duplicate content issues - after trying various configurations with canonicals, robots, we decided it best and easier to manage to implement Meta NOINDEX tags to the pages that we wish the search engines to ignore.

There are about 10000 URL's in our site that can be crawled - 6000 are Meta No Index - and 3000 odd are index follow.

There is a high proportion of Meta No Index tags - can that harm our SEO efforts?

thanks,

Ben

[AlanMosley]

no not if your not indexing it, your doing what they want, cleaning up the index, but still letting the crawler find links to other pages

[bjs2010]

Hi Alan,

I have NOINDEX, FOLLOW - it's to address the duplicate content and low content pages so that Google does not include them - some of the pages we are making a lot of content for.

My question really pertains to, if the bots see a site with a lot of NOINDEX, FOLLOW will they be worried that this site is overall low content??

[Bio-RadAbs]

I'm using the following meta tag

I'll add follow, better safe than sorry!

[AlanMosley]

Yes you are correct, at least you would think so. but I would add the follow just in case.

I assume you are using the meta noindex and not robots as robots,txt will stop both index and follow I believe.

[Bio-RadAbs]

We have a high no index count due to search pages set as no index, would you recommend these search pages be no index, follow rather than just 'no index'?

I thought leaving 'no index' is enough as search engines would default to 'no index, follow'?

[AlanMosley]

Yes, noindex means that any links pointing to those pages are wasting link juice. You should use noindex,follow to make sure that the link juice is returned though out links.

I know that many with CMS sites have 5this problem, but the numbers you are reporting do seem very large.