Should I be deindexing pages with thin or weak content?
-
If I have pages that rank product categories by alphabetical order should I deindex those pages? Keeping in mind the pages do not have any content apart from product titles?
For example:
If I deindexed these pages would I lose any authority passed through internal linking?
-
Cheers Guys,Thanks for clearing that up!
-
Hi - If you have too many thin pages developed on site - the best way as suggested by Chris too - is 'noindex, follow'
There is no negative Impact, rather helps Search Engines to understand site hierarchy better - by been allowed to crawl and index on rather pages with full of content. The follow tag will pass on all link authority to internal links. Only the page will be deindexed from search engines
Its in a way good - as no user will land on to pages, with very little or no content - thus avoiding single page bounces too
-
Reducing the size by eliminating those pages won't have any negative effect on your site.
-
Hi Chris,Thats great!
So If I keep them followed, the link juice will still pass on. Do you think it will have a negative impact on the site as a whole, by decreasing the amount of pages being indexed by Google. i.e. Reducing the site size?
Thanks for the articles aswell, very useful!
-
Jonathan,
If you noindex, follow them, link juice will pass from upstream links through to the downstream links but if you nofollow them, it won't.
This thread goes into some detail on the same topic http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-treat-internal-links-with-rel-nofollow
Rand wrote a pretty thorough guide on the fundamentals of PR sculpting you might want to check out: http://moz.com/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow
-
Hi Ruchi,
If you look at this website for an example:
http://www.campusexplorer.com/colleges/alphabet/j/
Now obviously, Google doesn't react well to pages that have thin or weak content, therefore what I am asking is would the value of deindexing the page outweigh the benefit these pages are receiving in internal link authority?
-
Well, your query is bit unclear. if you don't have any content on these pages than why do you need those pages on your website?
And if these are the categories than each category should have a proper name.
If if you have pagination on your website, like album a, album b, album c, then you should use Canonical Tag For Paginated Results
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
-
For My International Sites only Homepage in other Language rest Pages are in English. Hreflang required here?
Hello All, For my ecommerce site at my homepage there is an Language option of 9 different countries. My main site - abcd.co.uk and other sites are like this se.abcd.co.uk, fr.abcd.co.uk, es.abcd.co.uk etc From my main site if user clicks on fr.abcd.co.uk then France site will open but when he click on any link it will redirect to my UK site. On France site homepage if user hover the cursor then links are visible of UK site only. My query is ;- Do it required here to implement hreflang? As only homepage is in different language? Do it anything wrong in google point of view? Thanks!
International SEO | | wright3350 -
Low Index: 72 pages submitted and only 1 Indexed?
Hi Mozers, I'm pretty stuck on this and wondering if anybody else can give me some heads up around what might be causing the issues. I have 3 top level domains, NZ, AU, and USA. For some od reason I seem to be having a real issue with these pages indexing and also the sitemaps and I'm considering hiring someone to get the issue sorted as myself or my developer can''t seem to find the issues. I have attached an example of the sitemap_au.xml file. As you can see there is only 1 page that has been indexed and 72 were submitted. Basically because we host all of our domains on the same server, I was told last time our sitemaps were possibly been overwritten hence the reason why we have sitemap_au.xml and its the same for the other sitemap_nz.xml and sitemap_us.xml I also orignially had sitemap.xml for each. Another issue I am having is the meta tag des for each home page in USA and AU are showing the meta tag for New Zealand but when you look into the com and com.au code meta tag description they are all different as you can see here http://bit.ly/1KTbWg0 and here http://bit.ly/1AU0f5k Any advice around this would be so much appreciated! Thanks Justin new
International SEO | | edward-may0 -
Duplicate product description ranking problems (off-site duplicate content)
We do business in niche category and not in English language market. We have 2-3 main competitors who use same product information as us. They all do have same duplicate products descriptions as we. We with one competitors have domains with highest authority in this market. They maybe have 10-20% better link profile (when counting linking domains and total links). Problem is that they rank much better with product names then we do (same duplicate product descriptions as we have and almost same level internal optimisation) and they haven't done any extra link building for products. Manufacturers website aren't problem, because these doesn't rank well with product name keywords. Most of our new and some old product go to the Supplemental Results and are shown in "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ... already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.". Unique text for products isn't a option. When we have writen unique content for product, then these seem to rank way better. So our questions is what can we do externaly to help our duplicate description product rank better compared to our main competitor withour writing unique text? How important is indexation time? Will it give big advantage to get indexed first? We have thought of using more RSS/bing services to get faster indexation (both site will get products information almost at same time). It seems our competitor get quicker in index then we do. Also are farmpages helpful for getting some quick low value links for new products. We have planed to make 2-3 domains that would have few links pointint to these new products to get little advantage right after products are launched and doesn't have extranl links. Sitemap works and our new product are shown on front pages (products that still mostly doesn't rank well and go to Supplemental Results). Some new product have #1 or top3 raking, but these are only maybe 1/3 that should have top3 rankings. Also we have noticed problem that when we index products quickly (for example Fetch as Google) then these will get good top3 results and then some will get out of rankings (to Supplemental Results).
International SEO | | raido0 -
Duplicate content - news archive
Most of them are due to news items having more than 1 category – which is pretty normal.Also /us/blog, /uk/blog and /ca/blog are effectively the same page.None of them are actually duplicate content – just alternate URLs for the same pagehttp://www.fdmgroup.com/category/news/
International SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Multilingual Ecommerce Product Pages Best Practices
Hi Mozzers, We have a marketplace with 20k+ products, most of which are written in English. At the same time we support several different languages. This changes the chrome of the site (nav, footer, help text, buttons, everything we control) but leaves all the products in their original language. This resulted in all kinds of duplicate content (pages, titles, descriptions) being detected by SEOMoz and GWT. After doing some research we implemented the on page rel="alternate" hreflang="x", seeing as our situation almost perfectly matched the first use case listed by Google on this page http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077. This ended up not helping at all. Google still reports duplicate titles and descriptions for thousands of products, months after setting this up. We are thinking about changing to the sitemap implementation rel="alternate" hreflang="X", but are not sure if this will work either. Other options we have considered include noindex or blocks with robots.txt when the product language is not the same as the site language. That way the feature is still open to users while removing the duplicate pages for Google. So I'm asking for input on best practice for getting Google to correctly recognize one product, with 6 different language views of that same product. Can anyone help? Examples: (Site in English, Product in English) http://website.com/products/product-72 (Site in Spanish, Product in English) http://website.com/es/products/product-72 (Site in German, Product in English) http://website.com/de/products/product-72 etc...
International SEO | | sedwards0 -
Should product-pages with different currencies have different URLs?
Here is a question that should be of interest for small online merchants selling internationally in multiple currencies. When, based on geolocation, a product-page is served with different currencies, should a product-page have a different URL for each currency? Thanks.
International SEO | | AdrienOLeary0 -
Is duplicate content a concern across multiple CCTLDs?
Looking for experienced feedback on a new client challenge. Multiple pages of content in the English language are replicated across multiple CCTLDs in addition to the .com address we're working with. Is duplicate content a concern in this case? What measures are recommended to help preserve their North American search inclusion while not serving as a detriment to external (European/Asian CCTLDs) properties aimed for other geos/languages? EDIT: After posting, this was read. Any thoughts? http://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-tools-provides-details-on-duplicate-content-across-domains-99246
International SEO | | eMagineSEO0 -
Is duplicate content really an issue on different International Google engines?
i.e. Google.com v.s. Google.co.uk This relates to another question I have open on a similar issue. So if I open the same e-commerce site (virtually) on company.com and company.co.uk, does Google really view that as duplicate content? I would be inclined to think they have that figured out but I havent had much experience with international SEO...
International SEO | | BlinkWeb0