"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
-
Greetings MOZ community:
If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"?
My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense.
What is proper form?
As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content.
Thanks, Alan
-
Personally I think its madness to "no follow" any internal links. When you "no follow" you are throwing link juice out the window, the days of sculpting links ( the practice of "no following" some links on a page so more juice flows though other "follow" links) are long gone, yet is still see it being attempted all over the place.
-
I can agree on this one, in most cases there are still relevant links or main navigation on the page. So that's why it's valuable to have bots follow these links.
-
I personally would follow them There is no issue in having a page with thin content followed, it will not hurt anything.
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
-
Software "card" carousel results
Hi all! Does anyone have advice for getting a software product to appear in the card results at the top of SERPs? Example https://www.google.com/search?q=budgeting+software&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS784US784&oq=budgeting+software&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2194j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 dzTpe2B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
Why is a canonicalized URL still in index?
Hi Mozers, We recently canonicalized a few thousand URLs but when I search for these pages using the site: operator I can see that they are all still in Google's index. Why is that? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be taken out of the index? Or should we only expect that they won't rank as high as the canonical URLs? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Using "nofollow" internally can help with crawl budget?
Hello everyone. I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it: https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/ Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
We 410'ed URLs to decrease URLs submitted and increase crawl rate, but dynamically generated sub URLs from pagination are showing as 404s. Should we 410 these sub URLs?
Hi everyone! We recently 410'ed some URLs to decrease the URLs submitted and hopefully increase our crawl rate. We had some dynamically generated sub-URLs for pagination that are shown as 404s in google. These sub-URLs were canonical to the main URLs and not included in our sitemap. Ex: We assumed that if we 410'ed example.com/url, then the dynamically generated example.com/url/page1 would also 410, but instead it 404’ed. Does it make sense to go through and 410 these dynamically generated sub-URLs or is it not worth it? Thanks in advice for your help! Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeffchen0 -
Are 1x Event pages considered thin content? Should they be archived or redirected?
Since past event pages will become stale after the event, should they be keep alive and archived with only a link from a couple of places (for instance the main event page and html sitemap). Or should they be "retired" and redirected to the main event page if they are really no longer needed? They would probably be considered thin content because they won't have much traffic and will have very few links pointing to them. Right? Thanks. Inquiring minds want to know... 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cindyt-170380 -
How to take out international URL from google US index/hreflang help
Hi Moz Community, Weird/confusing question so I'll try my best. The company I work for also has an Australian retail website. When you do a site:ourbrand.com search the second result that pops up is au.brand.com, which redirects to the actual brand.com.au website. The Australian site owner removed this redirect per my bosses request and now it leads to a an unavailable webpage. I'm confused as to best approach, is there a way to noindex the au.brand.com URL from US based searches? My only problem is that the au.brand.com URL is ranking higher than all of the actual US based sub-cat pages when using a site search. Is this an appropriate place for an hreflang tag? Let me know how I can help clarify the issue. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
URLs are not indexed
My website has 0.5 million pages with urls like this- **http://www.mycity4kids.com/Delhi-NCR/collage-painting-classes-%3cnear%3e-shalimar-bagh ****, **none of these urls are indexed. Question 1- What can be the possible reason for this issue? Users see this url as : http://www.mycity4kids.com/Delhi-NCR/collage-painting-classes-<near>-shalimar-bagh</near>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prsntsnh
The symbol "<" and ">" get converted into "%3c" and "%3e" respectively, is this the reason for these urls not getting indexed?0 -
Strange 404s in GWT - "Linked From" pages that never existed
I’m having an issue with Google Webmaster Tools saying there are 404 errors on my site. When I look into my “Not Found” errors I see URLs like this one: Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ When I click on that and go to the “Linked From” tab, GWT says the page is being linked from http://www.myrtlebeach.com/Real-Estate-1/Rentals-Wanted-228/Myrtle-Beach-202/subcatsubc/ The problem here is that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, making it impossible for anything to be “linked from” that page. Many more strange URLs like this one are also showing as 404 errors. All of these contain “subcatsubc” somewhere in the URL. My Question: If that page has never existed on myrtlebeach.com, how is it possible to be linking to itself and causing a 404?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fuel0