Pages to be indexed in Google
-
Hi,
We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages.
Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone.
My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate.
If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow
Regards
-
Thank you Gagan!
-
Its a much better and clear explanation... +1 to it. Cheers !!
-
One key point on using robots.txt vs the meta tag noindex. It is not that the noindex meta tag is "superior" they just work differently.
If you use robots.txt - it will stop the spider from visiting that page, but it will not remove the page from the index. Also, if you have a page in robots.txt and on that page have a 301 redirect, or a canonical or a meta noindex Google will not see the page (due to the robots.txt directive) and then not be able to act on the 301 or canonical or the meta noindex.
A meta noindex, because the spider crawls the page, will not only tell Google not to visit the page anymore, but also tells Google to remove the page from the index. This is key if you want the pages removed from the Google index.
The rule of thumb I use is that
-
If you have a page that is not in the Google index and you want to keep it out of the index put that file in robots.txt.
-
If you have a page that is in the Google index and you want it removed, then use the noindex meta tag, do not put it into the robots.txt for reasons mentioned above. Over time, once the pages are removed (and this may take a while depending on how often the page is cralwed) then you can put into robots.txt for good measure.
-
-
In order to exclude individual pages from search engine indices, **the noindex meta tag **is actually superior to robots.txt.
-
Noindex is good or robots deny
Whats the difference or can do both?
-
If they have pretty low content or do not add any value and is not searched by users too
Will be better to add noindex so as to have search engines crawl your site in a better way.
-
if those are generating a high bounce rate I would block them for search engines. The easiest way is probably by a robots.txt
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
-
Issues Indexing Translated Pages
I'm having trouble getting http://www.procloud.ch/ to index for their german pages. The english pages are being indexed but not the german. Any ideas? Chris
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Specific pages won't index
I have a few pages on my site that Google won't index, and I can't understand why. I've looked into possible issues with Robots, noindex, redirects, canonicals, and Search Console rules. I've got nothing. Example: I want this page to index https://tour.franchisebusinessreview.com/services/franchisee-satisfaction-surveys/ When I Google the full URL, I get results including the non-subdomain homepage, and various pages on the subdomain, including a child page of the page I want, but not the page itself. Any ideas? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | ericstites0 -
Carousel of cards at the top of a Google search results page?
When I searched for "mapping software", a carousel of images which displayed a variety of different companies appeared above the results list. Does anyone know what this is and how you go about getting your company into this carousel? The attached image displays the carousel. gRjF1
Technical SEO | | eSpatial0 -
My sites "pages indexed by Google" have gone up more than qten-fold.
Prior to doing a little work cleaning up broken links and keyword stuffing Google only indexed 23/333 pages. I realize it may not be because of the work but now we have around 300/333. My question is is this a big deal? cheers,
Technical SEO | | Billboard20120 -
When i type site:jamalon.com to discover number of pages indexed it gives me different result from google web master tools
when i type site:jamalon.com to discover number of pages indexed it gives me different result from google web master tools
Technical SEO | | Jamalon0 -
Bing indexing at a tiny fraction of Google
I've read through other posts about this but I can't find a solution that works for us. My site is porch.com, 1M+ pages indexed on Google, ~10k on Bing. I've submitted the same sitemaps, and there's nothing different for each bot in our robots file. It looks like Bing is more concerned with our 500 errors than Google, but not sure if that might be causing the issue. Can anyone point me to the right things to be researching/investigating? Fixing errors, sitemap crawling issues, etc. I'm not sure what to spend my time looking into...
Technical SEO | | Porch0 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Exclude mobile pages from non mobile Google serps
Hi Everybody I see that a lot of our pages on our mobile shop has started to turn up when i do site:domainname.com on google. As they could potentially compete with the similar non mobile version of the same page, is there some way to exlude the mobile domain in non mobile google result without blocking the mobile version altogether. We use an m.domain.com version for our mobile site.
Technical SEO | | AndersDK0