Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
-
Hello all!
I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd."
These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street".
Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them?
Thanks for any input.
Ken
-
Egol,
Thanks for this. I did consider the sub-domain option and I'm going to discuss this as an option with my team.
Ken
-
Stephan,
There is little Organic Search traffic to these pages but there are a number of links pointing to them. One of the benefits of this type of business is that you're associated with local governments so you do get links from .gov sites. Most go to the service home pages but there are some that drive to the individual issue pages.
The grouping by category is something to think about. I'll discuss with the team.
Thanks!
-
I really like Stpehan's idea of "indexed collections of complaints".
-
Hi Ken,
It depends a little on how the complaints are organised within the site structure, what links they have, and what traffic these pages bring in. Unless you think domain authority is a particularly big factor in the competitive space the site operates in, I wouldn't fixate on DA. Questions you do want to answer:
- Crawl the whole site, preferably using the Google Search Console and/or Google Analytics API with Screaming Frog. Do these complaints bring in (useful) traffic? Surely part of what makes the 311 service useful for community managers is that people in their community can easily comment and see the comments of others? Thinking further down the line, if the site is difficult for people in the community to find, will they use it less, and thus will community managers see less value in the service over time? Indirectly, people leaving complaints is probably a good thing for the service; do they usually do this after searching for "potholes on main street"? This is all guesswork on my part, as I haven't seen the site.
- If you do have a lot of traffic to the complaint pages, is it useful traffic? Could you afford to lose it (because that may happen if you noindex)? Remember to bear in mind the second-order effects: if nobody complains any more, the manager doesn't need a 311 service!
- Do you actually have valuable (external) links to the complaints? We can't guess at that—the only solution is to use Open Site Explorer, ahrefs, Majestic, etc...
Without knowing more, I'll just say: there probably isn't value in having an indexed page for each complaint, but there might be value in having indexed collections of complaints, optimised for neighbourhood or street. So if there are 6 complaints about potholes on main street, a first step might be for each individual complaint-page to canonical back to the page detailing all complaints about main street. And if complaints are really that brief (1 or 2 sentences), eventually I'd prefer to change the site structure altogether, so that each complaint didn't get its own page at all, but that I had one page for each neighbourhood/street/etc, with the complaints listed there and preferably summarised in some way (i.e. "8 pothole complaints", "9 traffic light complaints, etc.) That kind of view might be useful if I was a resident of the place. You would still have to deal with pagination, especially if the number of complaints is large, but that's still going to be far fewer pages than if you have one for every complaint individually.
-
Just stating a couple of facts and a couple of things that I believe about those facts..... I'll be clear to state the parts that are beliefs below.
-
If you have a lot of thin content pages on a website then you run the risk of Google seeing those thin content pages and slapping the domain with a Panda problem. I believe that can cause reduced rankings across the entire domain.
-
Google recently said that they are going to stop following the links on noindex pages. From that, I believe that some pagerank will be lost from every link that enters them. I believe that can result in lower rankings for the entire domain.
If I owned the site above. I would place all of these pages where they can be safely noindexed without causing a loss of pagerank and not produce a Panda problem. That would require them to be in a subdomain that is noindexed or on another domain that is no indexed.
That's what I would do with these pages.
-
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
-
Page with metatag noindex is STILL being indexed?!
Hi Mozers, There are over 200 pages from our site that have a meta tag "noindex" but are STILL being indexed. What else can I do to remove them from the Index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
My product category pages are not being indexed on google can someone help?
My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chelseaskirtinguk0 -
Redirected Old Pages Still Indexed
Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago. We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp). The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
[E-commerce] Duplicate content due to color variations (canonical/indexing)
Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge0 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
How to get content to index faster in Google.....pubsubhubbub?
I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Could you use a robots.txt file to disalow a duplicate content page from being crawled?
A website has duplicate content pages to make it easier for users to find the information from a couple spots in the site navigation. Site owner would like to keep it this way without hurting SEO. I've thought of using the robots.txt file to disallow search engines from crawling one of the pages. Would you think this is a workable/acceptable solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gregelwell0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0