"No Index, No Follow" or No Index, Follow" for URLs with Thin Content?
-
Greetings MOZ community:
If I have a site with about 200 thin content pages that I want Google to remove from their index, should I set them to "No Index, No Follow" or to "No Index, Follow"?
My SEO firm has advised me to set them to "No Index, Follow" but on a recent MOZ help forum post someone suggested "No Index, No Follow". The MOZ poster said that telling Google the content was should not be indexed but the links should be followed was inconstant and could get me into trouble. This make a lot of sense.
What is proper form?
As background, I think I have recently been hit with a Panda 4.0 penalty for thin content. I have several hundred URLs with less than 50 words and want them de-indexed. My site is a commercial real estate site and the listings apparently have too little content.
Thanks, Alan
-
Personally I think its madness to "no follow" any internal links. When you "no follow" you are throwing link juice out the window, the days of sculpting links ( the practice of "no following" some links on a page so more juice flows though other "follow" links) are long gone, yet is still see it being attempted all over the place.
-
I can agree on this one, in most cases there are still relevant links or main navigation on the page. So that's why it's valuable to have bots follow these links.
-
I personally would follow them There is no issue in having a page with thin content followed, it will not hurt anything.
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
-
URL indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap
Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers Symptoms : On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap However, those URLs are in the sitemap Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message Potential explanation : We have an automatic cache clearing process within the company once a day. In the sitemap, we use this as last modification date. Let's imagine url www.example.com/hello was modified last time in 2017. But because the cache is cleared daily, in the sitemap we will have last modified : yesterday, even if the content of the page did not changed since 2017. We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ? We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZozoMe0 -
Best Way To Go About Fixing "HTML Improvements"
So I have a site and I was creating dynamic pages for a while, what happened was some of them accidentally had lots of similar meta tags and titles. I then changed up my site but left those duplicate tags for a while, not knowing what had happened. Recently I began my SEO campaign once again and noticed that these errors were there. So i did the following. Removed the pages. Removed directories that had these dynamic pages with the remove tool in google webmasters. Blocked google from scanning those pages with the robots.txt. I have verified that the robots.txt works, the pages are longer in google search...however it still shows up in in the html improvements section after a week. (It has updated a few times). So I decided to remove the robots.txt file and now add 301 redirects. Does anyone have any experience with this and am I going about this the right away? Any additional info is greatly appreciated thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz0 -
Your advice regarding thin content would be really appreciated
Hi guys, I have embarked on a new site creation. The site is being created from scratch and very custom. Basically the site allows people to review certain products and services. If each review completed by users is seen as a seperate page by google ... is this considered deceptive or a likelihood of being slapped with a thin content penalty? Basically 1 product may have hundreds of reviews naturally over time. Some may be really short and some may be longer. the reason why i would like the user reviews to be seen as seperate pages is because I want google to understand that people are regularly interacting with the main content page. Any advice in this area would be really appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irdeto0 -
Hreflang="x-default"
Hello all This is my first question in the Moz Forum, hope I will get some concrete answers 🙂 I am looking for some suggestions on implementing the hreflang="x-default" properly in our site. Any previous experience or a link to a specific resource/ example will be very helpful. I have found many examples on implementing the homepage hreflang, however nothing on non-homepage urls within your site. The below will be the code for the "Homepage" for /uk/. Here /en-INT/ is a Global English site not targeted for any country unlike en-MY, en-SG, en-AU etc. Is this the correct approach? Now, in case of non homepage urls, should the respective en-INT url be "x-default" or the "x-default" shouldn't exist altogether? For example, will the below be the correct coding? Many thanks Avi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Delonghi_Group0 -
Can't get auto-generated content de-indexed
Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me! Customgia.com, a costume jewelry e-commerce site, has two types of product pages - public pages that are internally linked and private pages that are only accessible by accessing the URL directly. Every item on Customgia is created online using an online design tool. Users can register for a free account and save the designs they create, even if they don't purchase them. Prior to saving their design, the user is required to enter a product name and choose "public" or "private" for that design. The page title and product description are auto-generated. Since launching in October '11, the number of products grew and grew as more users designed jewelry items. Most users chose to show their designs publicly, so the number of products in the store swelled to nearly 3000. I realized many of these designs were similar to each and occasionally exact duplicates. So over the past 8 months, I've made 2300 of these design "private" - and no longer accessible unless the designer logs into their account (these pages can also be linked to directly). When I realized that Google had indexed nearly all 3000 products, I entered URL removal requests on Webmaster Tools for the designs that I had changed to "private". I did this starting about 4 months ago. At the time, I did not have NOINDEX meta tags on these product pages (obviously a mistake) so it appears that most of these product pages were never removed from the index. Or if they were removed, they were added back in after the 90 days were up. Of the 716 products currently showing (the ones I want Google to know about), 466 have unique, informative descriptions written by humans. The remaining 250 have auto-generated descriptions that read coherently but are somewhat similar to one another. I don't think these 250 descriptions are the big problem right now but these product pages can be hidden if necessary. I think the big problem is the 2000 product pages that are still in the Google index but shouldn't be. The following Google query tells me roughly how many product pages are in the index: site:Customgia.com inurl:shop-for Ideally, it should return just over 716 results but instead it's returning 2650 results. Most of these 1900 product pages have bad product names and highly similar, auto-generated descriptions and page titles. I wish Google never crawled them. Last week, NOINDEX tags were added to all 1900 "private" designs so currently the only product pages that should be indexed are the 716 showing on the site. Unfortunately, over the past ten days the number of product pages in the Google index hasn't changed. One solution I initially thought might work is to re-enter the removal requests because now, with the NOINDEX tags, these pages should be removed permanently. But I can't determine which product pages need to be removed because Google doesn't let me see that deep into the search results. If I look at the removal request history it says "Expired" or "Removed" but these labels don't seem to correspond in any way to whether or not that page is currently indexed. Additionally, Google is unlikely to crawl these "private" pages because they are orphaned and no longer linked to any public pages of the site (and no external links either). Currently, Customgia.com averages 25 organic visits per month (branded and non-branded) and close to zero sales. Does anyone think de-indexing the entire site would be appropriate here? Start with a clean slate and then let Google re-crawl and index only the public pages - would that be easier than battling with Webmaster tools for months on end? Back in August, I posted a similar problem that was solved using NOINDEX tags (de-indexing a different set of pages on Customgia): http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-site-have-a-duplicate-content-issue#reply_176813 Thanks for reading through all this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rja2140 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
How use Rel="canonical" for our Website
How is the best way to use Rel="canonical" for our website www.ofertasdeemail.com.br, for we can say goodbye for duplicated pages? I appreciate for every help. I also hope to contribute to the SEOmoz community. Sincerely,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZZNINTERNETMEDIAGROUP
Amador Goncalves0 -
What do do when sidebar is causing "Too Many On-Page Links" error
I have been going through all the errors, warnings from my weekly SEO Moz scans. One thing I'm see a bit of is "Too Many On-Page Links". I've only seen a few, but as in the case of this one: http://blog.mexpro.com/5-kid-friendly-cancun-mexico-resorts there is only 2 links on the page (the image and the read more). So I think the sidebar links are causing the error. I feel my tags are important to help readers find information they may be looking for. Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud? Should I exclude the tags, with the risk of making things more difficult for my users? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0