10,000 New Pages of New Content - Should I Block in Robots.txt?
-
I'm almost ready to launch a redesign of a client's website. The new site has over 10,000 new product pages, which contain unique product descriptions, but do feature some similar text to other products throughout the site.
An example of the page similarities would be the following two products:
-
Brown leather 2 seat sofa
-
Brown leather 4 seat corner sofa
Obviously, the products are different, but the pages feature very similar terms and phrases.
I'm worried that the Panda update will mean that these pages are sand-boxed and/or penalised.
Would you block the new pages? Add them gradually? What would you recommend in this situation?
-
-
Consider reversing your thinking from "what will be my loss to panda" into "what can I do to make this site kick ass".
Reach for opportunity, extend yourself.
If this was my site I would get a writer on those product descriptions to make them unquestionably unique, beef them up, add salesmanship and optimize them for search. This will give you substantive unique content, that converts better, pulls more long tail traffic and moves out of competition with other sites that do the minimal.
Sure, it will cost money but in the long run it could bring back a huge return.
My only caution on this is that if you make this investment in writing you need to do that on a site that has can pull reasonable traffic. If you do this on a site that has no links it will not do you much good. It is part of a marketing plan not a single item on a "to do" list.
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
Would it work to place H1 (or important page keywords) at the top of your page in HTML and move lower on page with CSS?
I understand that the H1 tag is no longer heavily correlated with stronger ranking signals but it is more important that Keywords or keyphrases are at the top of a page. My question is, if I just put my important keyword (or H1) toward the top of my page in the HTML and move it towards the middle/lower portion with css position elements, will this still be viewed by Googlebot as important keywords toward the top of my page? QCaxMHL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Block lightbox content
I'm working on a new website with aggregator of content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPalmer
i'll show to my users content from another website in my website in LIGHTBOX windows when they'll click on the title of the items. ** I don't have specific url for these items.
What is the best way to say for SE "Don't index these pages"?0 -
Imange name and html page name same are count spammy contents ?
Imange name and html page name same is count spammy contents ex. watertreatment - plan.jpg watertreatment - plan.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Poojath0 -
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time?
New site, new URL, lots of custom content. Load it all or "trickle" it over time? Would it make a difference in terms of ranking the site? Interested in your thoughts. Thanks! BBuck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
SEO for 1,000,000 page site
Dear All, I hope you can help me with another question about doing SEO for a large site: 1 - My domain is 11 year old, all time was a parking domain
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveTran2013
2 - We have 10,000 articles - unique content (500-1500 words)
3 - the remaining are automated content, however, they are also unique with data (numbers, figure) We are going to launch it in 2 weeks, and intend to do the following things: Stage 1: first 2 months - only post 10,000 articles with unique content, NO using automated ones.
Link building: get 5-10 authority links pointing to it, either article writings or link pages (authority links Yahoo directory/Dmoz) Stage 2: month 3 to 6: gradually put the automated content online while still posting unique and well written articles.
Link building: Start building links with PR websites, article submission. Do you think there are any problems with this plan? and if 5-10 links can improve our site ranking, given it has a lot of unique content? Thank you very much. BR/Tran1 -
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 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990