Noindex user profile
-
I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions:
- What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm.
- How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive?
- When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed
- Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity)
- (unique) Profile picture
- (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks or user's own site.
- Embedded Google Map
Thanks!
-
The one thing I would add to your list of criteria, if you choose to go that route, is to look at Google Analytics landing pages and make sure the individual profiles don't any inbound search traffic.
-
The gain would be that you don't index a bunch of URLs on your site that contain essentially similar/thin content. I wouldn't necessarily count those that do bring in long tail traffic as ones you'd want to noindex. Things will return to normal once you remove the noindex, but unless you have decent links pointing to those profiles, it may take up to numerous months to for them to be recrawled. I'd weigh most heavily links (followed or no followed) to the profiles from decent sites, as well as activity that shows on the profile page. The rest I wouldn't consider in the threshold calculation.
-
1. unless you have a big thin content problem there is no gain
2. completely reversible, just remove and wait
3. you will have to decide, you seem like you are on the right track.
4. Question you should have asked, is there any downside to no-indexing these pages, Answer Yes there is, all links pointing to a no-indexed page will leak all their link juice, noindex is a last resort, I have never used.
if you must noindex a page, do it with a meta no-index,follow tag, note that was "follow", not "no-follow", then your link juice will flow into the page and back out again.
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
-
False Soft 404s, Shadow Bans, and Old User Generated Content
What are the best ways to keep old user generated content (UGC) pages from being falsely flagged by Google as soft 404s? I have tried HTML site maps to make sure no page is an orphaned but that has not solved the problem. Could crawled currently not indexed by explained by a shadow ban from Google? I have had problems with Google removing pages from SERPs without telling me about it. It looks like a lot of content is not ranking due to its age. How can one go about refreshing UGC without changing the work of the user?
Technical SEO | | STDCarriers0 -
Best way to noindex long dynamic urls?
I just got a Mozcrawl back and see lots of errors for overly dynamic urls. The site is a villa rental site that gives users the ability to search by bedroom, amenities, price, etc, so I'm wondering what the best way to keep these types of dynamically generated pages with urls like /property-search-page/?location=any&status=any&type=any&bedrooms=9&bathrooms=any&min-price=any&max-price=any from indexing. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated : )
Technical SEO | | wcbuckner0 -
Duplicated content in news portal: should we use noindex?
Hello, We have a news portal, and like other newspapers we have our own content and content from other contributors. Both our content and our contributors content can be found in other websites (we sell our content and they give theirs to us). In this regard, everything seems to work fine from the business and users perspective. The problem is that this means duplicated content... so my question is: "Should we add the noindex,nofollow" tag to these articles? Notice that there might be hundreds of articles everyday, something like a 1/3 of the website. I checked one newspaper which uses news from agencies, but they seem not to use any noindex tag. Not sure what others do. I would appreciate any opinion on that.
Technical SEO | | forex-websites0 -
Forum profile section or signature line as backlink
Hi, Forum profile section or signature line as backlink VS Answering a question and giving a related post URl as the answer is better? I have the above question on which would be better Would a signature or website name in the profile is valuable then a link to your site where information is available? Does Google consider both as spam/blackhat? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Developing a link profile.....
So we are a brand new site looking to establish a link profile of earned links vs. manipulative link building practices and have received some conflicting information. Our goal is to provide users and webmasters of relevant websites with useful content about the areas and topics we cover and let them decide to link to us. We have been advised by some parties that in order to develop a base set of links we should enter our website into directories. Now I understand entering it into some of the main directories such as BOTW and Yahoo etc, but please offer your thoughts on smaller less official directories. Thanks in advance. Scott
Technical SEO | | jackaveli0 -
Sitemaps and "noindex" pages
Experimenting a little bit to recover from Panda and added "noindex" tag for quite a few pages. Obviously now we need Google to re-crawl them ASAP and de-index. Should we leave these pages in sitemaps (with updated "lastmod") for that? Or just patiently wait? 🙂 What's the common/best way?
Technical SEO | | LocalLocal0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
How rel=canonical works with index, noindex ?
Hello all, I had always wondered how the index,noindex affects to the canonical. And also if the canonical post should be included in the sitemap or not. I posted this http://www.comparativadebancos.co... and with a rel=canonical to this that was published at the beginning of the month http://www.comparativadebancos.co... but then I have the first one in google http://www.google.com/search?aq=f... May be this is evident for you but, what is really doing the canonical? If I publish something with the canonical pointing to another page, will it still be indexed by google but with no penalty for duplicate content? Or the usual behaviour should have been to havent indexed the first post but just the second one? Should I also place a noindex in the first post in addition to the canonical? What am I missing here? thanks
Technical SEO | | antorome0