Should I better noindex 'scripted' files in our portfolio?
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Hello Moz community,
As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant).
For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html
However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in:
- thin content
- no H1
- missing meta description
- missing canonical tag
I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable.
Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files.
Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files?
(And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).
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Hey Arnout,
I would do a few things:
1. You should be able to edit the html code of each presentation to add to the meta title of the page. That should be a solid starting point. I know that is tedious but it will help you cover your bases. It looks like you are doing that already.
2. I would still disallow the directory via robots.txt.
3. #2 should work but as an extra, you could add a rel = no follow link property to the places where you link to that specific section. Here's a link for more details on that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
4. To speed the process up, I would use the search console and request to remove the directory
Hopefully that helps!
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