What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity?
-
Hello everyone,
Maybe it is a stupid question, but I ask to the experts... What's the best way to noindex pages but still keep backlinks equity from those noindexed pages?
For example, let's say I have many pages that look similar to a "main" page which I solely want to appear on Google, so I want to noindex all pages with the exception of that "main" page... but, what if I also want to transfer any possible link equity present on the noindexed pages to the main page?
The only solution I have thought is to add a canonical tag pointing to the main page on those noindexed pages... but will that work or cause wreak havoc in some way?
-
Thank you Chris for your in-depth answer, you just confirmed what I suspected.
To clarify though, what I am trying to save here by noindexing those subsequent pages is "indexing budget" not "crawl budget". You know the famous "indexing cap"? And also, tackling possible "duplicate" or "thin" content issues with such "similar but different" pages... fact is, our website has been hit by Panda several times, we recovered several times as well, but we have been hit again with the latest quality update of last June, and we are trying to find a way to get out of it once for all. Hence my attempt to reduce the number of similar indexed pages as much as we can.
I have just opened a discussion on this "Panda-non-sense" issue, and I'd like to know your opinion about it:
https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues
Thank you again.
-
Hi Fabrizo,
That's a tricky one given the sheer volume of pages/music on the site. Typically the cleanest way to handle all of this is to offer up a View All page and Canonical back to that but in your case, a View All pages would scroll on forever!
Canonical is not the answer here. It's made for handling duplicate pages like this:
www.website.com/product1.html
www.website.com/product1.html&sid=12432In this instance, both pages are 100% identical so the canonical tag tells Google that any variation of product1.html is actually just that page and should be counted as such. What you've got here is pagination so while the pages are mostly the same, they're not identical.
Instead, this is exactly what rel=prev/next is for which you've already looked into. It's very hard to find recent information on this topic but the traditional advice from Google has been to implement prev/next and they will infer the most important page (typically page one) from the fact that it's the only page that has a rel=next but no rel=prev (because there is no previous page). Apologies if you already knew all of this; just making sure I didn't skim over anything here. Google also says these pages will essentially be seen as a single unit from that point and so all link equity will be consolidated toward that block of pages.
Canonical and rel=next/prev do act separately so by all means if you have search filters or anything else that may alter the URL, a canonical tag can be used as well but each page here would just point back to itself, not back to page 1.
This clip from Google's Maile Ohye is quite old but the advice in here clears a few things up and is still very relevant today.
With that said, the other point you raised is very valid - what to do about crawl budget. Google also suggests just leaving them as-is since you're only linking to the first 5 pages and any links beyond that are buried so deep in the hierarchy they're seen as a low priority and will barely be looked at.
From my understanding (though I'm a little hesitant on this one) is that noindexed pages do retain their link equity. Noindex doesn't say 'don't crawl me' (also meaning it won't help your crawl budget, this would have to be done through Robots.txt), it says 'don't include me in your index'. So on this logic it would make sense that links pointing to a noindexed page would still be counted.
-
You are right, hard to give advice without the specific context.
Well, here is the problem that I am facing: we have an e-commerce website and each category has several hundreds if not thousands of pages... now, I want just the first page of each category page to appear in the index in order to not waste the index cap and avoid possible duplicate issues, therefore I want to noindex all subsequent pages, and index just the first page (which is also the most rich).
Here is an example from our website, our piano sheet music category page:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html
I want that first page to be in the index, but not the subsequent ones:
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html?cp=2
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Piano.html?cp=3
etc...
After playing with canonicals and rel,next, I have realized that Google still keeps those unuseful pages in the index, whereas by removing them could help with both index cap issues and possible Panda penalties (too many similar and not useful pages). But is there any way to keep any possible link-equity of those subsequent pages by noindexing them? Or maybe the link equity is anyway preserved on those pages and on the overall domain as well? And, better, is there a way to move all that possible link equity to the first page in some way?
I hope this makes sense. Thank you for your help!
-
Apologies for the indirect answer but I would have to ask "why"?
If these pages are almost identical and you only want one of them to be indexed, in most situations the users would probably benefit from there only being that one main page. Cutting down on redundant pages is great for UX, crawl budget and general site quality.
Maybe there is a genuine reason for it but without knowing the context it's hard to give accurate info on the best way to handle it
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
-
301ing one site's links to another
Hi, I have one site with a well-established link profile, but no actual reason to exist (site A). I have another site that could use a better link profile (site B). In your experience, would 301 forwarding all of site A's pages to site B do anything positive for the link profile/organic search of the site B? Site A is about boating at a specific lake. Site B is about travel destinations across the U.S. Thanks! Best... Michael
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Page dropped after backlink
This is a bit of a odd one... I put two new pages on to my website. And built one backlink to each page (each from separate domains). The pages and backlinks have indexed quite quickly. The odd thing is that one of my pages has dropped significantly in ranking but the other has boosted significantly in ranking! The 1st page has come to page 1 of google, the other pages dropped to page 3 of google. Prior to building the links the ranks was stable. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
What are best page titles for sub-domain pages?
Hi Moz communtity, Let's say a website has multiple sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. Generally we will be mentioning "primary keyword & "brand name" on every page of website. Can we do same on all pages of sub-domains to increase the authority of website for this primary keyword in Google? Or it gonna end up as negative impact if Google consider as duplicate content being mentioned same keyword and brand name on every page even on website and all pages of sub domains? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Are This Site's Backlinks Hurting Us?
Google WMT reports more than 198,000 backlinks to our site (www.audiobooksonline.com) from http://dilandau.eu/? We have never been notified by Google of any penalty, malware notification... but continue to struggle to get our page 1 Google ranking back since Panda. Could these backlinks be hurting our Google ranking? Should I implement a disavow rule for http://dilandau.eu/?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Meta NOINDEX and links into the pages?
If I have internal links pointing to pages that are META NO INDEX, will Google still index them? Or does that only apply to pages that are linked to from an external domain? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
What is the best way to handle special characters in URLs
What is the best way to handle special characters? We have some URL's that use special characters and when a sitemap is generate using Xenu it changes the characters to something different. Do we need to have physically change the URL back to display the correct character? Example: URL: http://petstreetmall.com/Feeding-&-Watering/361.html Sitmap Link: http://www.petstreetmall.com/Feeding-%26-Watering/361.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Best way to view Global Navigation bar from GoogleBot's perspective
Hi, Links in the global navigation bar of our website do not show up when we look at Google cache --> text only version of the page. These links use "style="<a class="attribute-value">display:none;</a>" when we looked at HTML source. But if I use "user agent switcher" add-on in Firefox and set it to Googlebot, the links in global nav are displayed. I am wondering what is the best way to find out if Google can/can not see the links. Thanks for the help! Supriya.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SShiyekar0 -
Any way to make my page on top of results again?
Hello Everyone, For a long time now I've had many of my website pages ranked on first page of results for some popular searches. On friday I noticed the traffic coming from google dropped dramatically and I realized that I was not on first page anymore. My SEO is focused for Google Spain. Here are some examples: http://msn-messenger.hispazone.com/ This page was on position 9 (first page) if we perform the search "Descargar msn" on Google. Now it's on page 3. http://http://adobe-acrobat-reader.hispazone.com/ This was position 5 (first page) for the search "descargar adobe". Now it's also page 3. Any suggestions? Best Regards.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HispaZone0