No-index pages with duplicate content?
-
Hello,
I have an e-commerce website selling about 20 000 different products. For the most used of those products, I created unique high quality content. The content has been written by a professional player that describes how and why those are useful which is of huge interest to buyers.
It would cost too much to write that high quality content for 20 000 different products, but we still have to sell them. Therefore, our idea was to no-index the products that only have the same copy-paste descriptions all other websites have.
Do you think it's better to do that or to just let everything indexed normally since we might get search traffic from those pages?
Thanks a lot for your help!
-
We recommend to such clients that they apply the robots noindex,follow meta tag on the duplicated pages until they get rewritten. We aim for 20% of all products on the site to be completely unique in content, and indexable. The other 80% can be rewritten gradually over time and released back into the index as they are rewritten.
So to answer you question: Yes, I think your plan is perfectly acceptable, and is what I would do myself if I were in the same situation.
-
Duplicate content is not a penalty, it's a filter. Deindexing will ensure that they never rank, leave them indexed and they have a chance of ranking, worst case scenario is they don't rank well because of it.
-
I think Devanur gives some good advice regarding the gradual improvement of the content, though you're stuck in a bit of a catch-22 with regard to how Google views websites: You want to be able to sell lots of products, but don't have the resources for your company present them in a unique or engaging fashion. This is something that Google wants webmasters to do, but the reality of your situation paints a completely different picture of what will give your company decent ROI for updating vast amounts of product content.
If there isn't an obvious Panda problem, I wouldn't just noindex lots of pages without some thought and planning first. Before noindexing the pages I would look at what SEO traffic they're getting. noindexing alone seems like a tried and tested method of bypassing potential Panda penalties and although PageRank will still be passed, there's a chance that you are going to remove pages from the index that are driving traffic (even if it's long tail).
In addition to prioritising content production for indexed pages per Devanur's advice, I would also do some keyword analysis and prioritise the production of new content for terms which people are actually searching for before they purchase.
There's a Moz discussion here which might help you: http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-vs-page-removal-panda-recovery.
Regards
George
@methodicalweb
-
Hi, the suggestion was not to get the quality articles written that take an hour to write each but I meant to change the products descriptions that were copied and pasted with little variation so that they don't look like a copy, paste job.
Now, coming to the de-indexing part, let us look at a scenario:
Suppose I built a website to promote Amazon products through Amazon associates program. I populated its pages using Amazon API through a plugin like WProbot or Protozon. In this case, the content will be purely scraped from Amazon and other places. After a while, I realize that my site has not been performing well in the search engines because of the scraped content but haven't seen any penalty levied or manual action taken. As of now, I have about 3000 pages in Google's index. Now I want to tackle the duplicate content issue. This is what I would do to be on a safer side from a possible penalty in future like Panda:
1. First, will make the top pages unique.
2. Add, noindex to the rest of the duplicate content pages.
3. Keep on making the pages unique in phases, removing the noindex tag to the ones that were updated with unique content.
4. Would repeat the above step till I fix all the duplicate content pages on the website.
It greatly depends on the level of content duplication and few other things so, we will be able to suggest better if we can have a look at the website in question. You can send a private message if you want any of us to have a look at it.
-
Hello,
Like I said in my first post, this has already been done. I was asking a specific question.
on another topic, 300 quality pages of content is not possible in the month. We're talking about articles that take at least an hour to write.
That being said, I'll ask my question again: once I have done, let's say, 750 pages of unique content, should I no-index the rest or not. is there something better to do that doesn't involve writing content for 20 000 pages?
Thanks.
-
Very true my friend. If you look at your top pages for last 30 days, there won't be more than 2000 approximately. So you can make the content unique on these over a period of six months or a bit more going at 300 per month. Trust me, this would be an effort well spent.
-
Hello,
I agree with you that it would be the best but like Isaid, writting content for 20 000 pages is not an option. Thanks for your answer!
-
Going off of what Devanur said. Giving your product pages unique content is the way to go. But this can include pictures, sizes, material and etc... I am in the rug business and this is how we pull it off and also how RugsUSA does as well. If you do not however, I would do what Devanur referred to with changing descriptions of your top selling products first.
All the best!
-
Hi,
While its not recommended to have duplicate content on your pages that is found else where, it is also not a good thing to de-index pages from Google. If I were you, I would have tried to beef-up these duplicate pages a little bit with unique content or at least rewritten the existing content so that it becomes unique.
Please go ahead and initiate the task of rewriting the product descriptions in phases starting with the ones that get the most traffic as per your web analytics data. Those were my two cents my friend.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Help: How to optimize my duplicate category pages
Hi all My category pages will showcase the same products how do I go about optimizing these pages so they don't show up as duplicate content? Would appreciate your all feedaback! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
Page Count in Webmaster Tools Index Status Versus Page Count in Webmaster Tools Sitemap
Greeting MOZ Community: I run www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a real estate website in New York City. The page count in Google Webmaster Tools Index status for our site is 850. The page count in our Webmaster Tools Sitemap is 637. Why is there a discrepancy between the two? What does the Google Webmaster Tools Index represent? If we filed a removal request for pages we did not want indexed, will these pages still show in the Google Webmaster Tools page count despite the fact that they no longer display in search results? The number of pages displayed in our Google Webmaster Tools Index remains at about 850 despite the removal request. Before a site upgrade in June the number of URLs in the Google Webmaster Tools Index and Google Webmaster Site Map were almost the same. I am concerned that page bloat has something to do with a recent drop in ranking. Thanks everyone!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Index Pages become No-Index
Hi Mozzers, Here is the scenario: I created a landing page targeting Holiday keywords for the holiday season. The page has been crawled and indexed - I see my landing page in the SERP. However, because of the CMS layout, since the Holiday is over and I don't want it to be displayed on the homepage, i have to remove the page from hp which makes it no-index (don't ask why, it's how the CMS was built). Question: How does this affect this LP's search? Since it's already crawled and etc. will it still be on the SERP after i change the page to no-index? If I remove the no-index next year for the holiday season, how does this all play out? Any insights or information provided will be appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TommyTan0 -
Google Is Indexing The Wrong Page For My Keyword
For a long time (almost 3 mounth) google indexing the wrong page for my main keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
The problem is that each time google indexed another page each time for a period of 4-7 days, Sometimes i see the home page, sometimes a category page and sometimes a product page.
It seems though Google has not yet decided what his favorite / better page for this keyword. This is the pages google index: (In most cases you can find the site on the second or third page) Main Page: http://bit.ly/19fOqDh Category Page: http://bit.ly/1ebpiRn Another Category: http://bit.ly/K3MZl4 Product Page: http://bit.ly/1c73B1s All links I get to the website are natural links, therefore in most cases the anchor we got is the website name. In addition I have many links I get from bloggers that asked to do a review on one of my products, I'm very careful about that and so I'm always checking the blogger and their website only if it is something good, I allowed it. also i never ask for a link back (must of the time i receive without asking), and as I said, most of their links are anchor with my website name. Here some example of links that i received from bloggers: http://bit.ly/1hF0pQb http://bit.ly/1a8ogT1 http://bit.ly/1bqqRr8 http://bit.ly/1c5QeC7 http://bit.ly/1gXgzXJ Please Can I get a recommendation what should you do?
Should I try to change the anchor of the link?
Do I need to not allow bloggers to make a review on my products? I'd love to hear what you recommend,
Thanks for the help0 -
Old pages still in index
Hi Guys, I've been working on a E-commerce site for a while now. Let me sum it up : February new site is launched Due to lack of resources we started 301's of old url's in March Added rel=canonical end of May because of huge index numbers (developers forgot!!) Added noindex and robots.txt on at least 1000 urls. Index numbers went down from 105.000 tot 55.000 for now, see screenshot (actual number in sitemap is 13.000) Now when i do site:domain.com there are still old url's in the index while there is a 301 on the url since March! I know this can take a while but I wonder how I can speed this up or am doing something wrong. Hope anyone can help because I simply don't know how the old url's can still be in the index. 4cArHPH.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ssiebn70 -
Duplicate Content Question
Currently, we manage a site that generates content from a database based on user search criteria such as location or type of business. ..Although we currently rank well -- we created the website based on providing value to the visitor with options for viewing the content - we are concerned about duplicate content issues and if they would apply. For example, the listing that is pulled up for the user upon one search could have the same content as another search but in a different order. Similar to hotels who offer room booking by room type or by rate. Would this dynamically generated content count as duplicate content? The site has done well, but don't want to risk a any future Google penalties caused by duplicate content. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompucastWeb1 -
Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi, we switched platforms to Magento last year. Since then our SERPS rankings have declined considerably (no sudden drop on any Panda/Penguin date lines). After investigating, it appeared we neglected to No index, follow all our filter pages and our total indexed pages rose sevenfold in a matter of weeks. We have since fixed the no index issue and the pages indexed are now below what we had pre switch to Magento. We've seen some positive results in the last week. Any ideas when/if our rankings will return? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page. For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages? Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640