Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
-
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept?
If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag?
If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
-
Sometimes you need to leave the crawl path open to Googlebot so they can get around the site. A specific example that may be relevant to you is in pagination. If you have 100 products and are only showing 10 on the first page Google will not be able to reach the other 90 product pages as easily if you block paginated pages in the robots.txt. Better options in such a case might be a robots noindex,follow meta tag, rel next/prev tags, or a "view all" canonical page.
If these pages aren't important to the crawlability of the site, such as internal search results, you could block them in the robots.txt file with little or no issues, and it would help to get them out of the index. If they aren't useful for spiders or users, or anything else, then yes you can and should probably let them 404, rather than blocking.
Yes, I do like to leave the blocked or removed URLs in the sitemap for just a little while to ensure Googlebog revisits them and sees the noindex tag, 404 error code, 301 redirect, or whatever it is they need to see in order to update their index. They'll get there on their own eventually, but I find it faster to send them to the pages myself. Once Googlebot visits these URls and updates their index you should remove them from your sitemaps.
-
If you want to noindex any of your pages, there is no way that Google or any other search engines will think something is fishy. Its up to the webmaster to decide what and what not to get indexed from his website. If you implement page level noindex, the link juice will still flow to the page but if you also have nofollow along with noindex, the link juice will flow to the page but will be contained on the page itself and will not be passed on the links that flow out of that page.
I conclude by saying, there is nothing wrong in making the pages non-indexable.
Here is an interesting discussion related to this on Moz:
http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice
Hope it helps.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Devanur,
What I am asking is if the robots/google will view it as a negative thing for noindexing pages and still trying to pass the link juice, even though the pages aren't even viewable to the front end user.
-
If you wish not to show these pages even to the front end user, you can just block them using the page level robots meta tag so that these pages will never be indexed by the search engines as well.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
-
Yes, but what if these pages aren't even viewable to the front end user?
-
Hi there, it is a very good idea to block any and all the pages that do not provide any useful content to the visitors and especially when they are very thin content wise. So the idea is to keep away low quality content that does no good to the visitor, from the Internet. Search engines would love every webmaster doing so.
However, sometimes, no matter how thin the content is on some pages, they still provide good information to the visitors and serve the purpose of the visit. In this case, you can provide contextual links to those pages and add the nofollow attribute to the link. Of course you should ideally be implementing the page level blocking using the robots meta tag on those pages. I do not think you should return a 404 on these pages as there is no need to do so. When a page level blocking is implemented, Google will not index the blocked content even if it finds a third party reference to it from elsewhere on the Internet.
If you have implemented the page level noindex using the robots meta tag, there is no need to go for a sitemap with these URLs. With noindex in place, as I mentioned above, Google will not index the content even if it discovers the page using a reference from anywhere on the Internet.
Hope it helps my friend.Best,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
-
Do home page carry more seo benefit than other pages?
hi, i would like to include my kws in the URL and they are under 50 characters. is there anything in the algo that tells engines to give more importance to homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | alan-shultis0 -
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
What can I put on a 404 page?
When it comes to SEO what can I put on a 404 page? I want to add content that actually makes the page useful so visitors will more likely stay on the website. Most pages just have a big image of 404 and a couple sentences saying what happened. I am wondering if Google would like if there was blog suggestions or navigational functions?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JoeyGedgaud0 -
How to ignore spam links to page?
Hey Moz pals, So for some reason someone is building thousands of links to my websites (all spam), likely someone doing negative seo on my site. Anyway, all these links are pointing to 1 sub url on my domain. That url didn't have anything on it so I deleted the page so now it comes up with a 404. Is there a way to reject any link that ever gets built to that old page? I don't want all this spam to hurt my website. What do you suggest?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WongNs0 -
"NOINDEX,FOLLOW" same as "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" ?
Notice the space between them - I am trying to debug my application and sometimes it put in a space - Will this small difference matter to the bots?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
One good domain generating to much links what to do
I think penguin had no effect yet on spain. propdental.com remain the same.And propdental.es still growing.No penguin 2.0 effect. I think it will need a few more days to see if there is impact on spain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas
Althought i have a question regarding coagnitive SEO, (is regarding a link to propdental.es from unidirectorio.com) i think is a good web, but as generated me an very big amount of links)i have this on link from unidirectorio.com that has generated 2400 links to www.propdental.es with this ancor text "clinica dental con dentistas especialistas en implantes dentales ortodoncia invisalign y carillas" Links is comes from this page http://undirectorio.com/Salud/dentistas/ and then generates 2400I can not remove this link. I seemed a good directory with just 3 pages linking out and good page rank on my specific field.I ask google to dont take that link into account, although i am not sure if i did it well.**Can someone tell me how to say to google to dont take in account the links from a domain?**google still shows this link on webmaster tools, i am afraid it ends up been bad. I seems a good directory is not an exact ancor text although containt all work i want to rank.What would be your advice? Do i have any way to make sure that google does not have the links recieved from that domain into account0 -
New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario. Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name. Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns. Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc. My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before. There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing? Thanks for thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
A domain is ranking for a plural key word in SERPs on page 1 but for the singular not at all?
What could the reasons that a domain is ranking for the plural version of a key word on SERPs page 1 and for the singular version not at all? Google knows that both key words belong together, as in the SERPs for one version also the other version of the key word is being highlighted. If I search for the domain with the plural keyword it shows up on the first page in SERPs, but If I search for the same keyword as singular (in German it is just removing an “s”) I see the plural version highlighted many times but I cannot find my domain. What could be the reason for this behavior? penalties?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SimCaffe0