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.
Do internal links from non-indexed pages matter?
-
Hi everybody! Here's my question.
After a site migration, a client has seen a big drop in rankings. We're trying to narrow down the issue. It seems that they have lost around 15,000 links following the switch, but these came from pages that were blocked in the robots.txt file. I was wondering if there was any research that has been done on the impact of internal links from no-indexed pages.
Would be great to hear your thoughts!
Sam
-
I assume these are pretty deep in the site structure, so I don't think those "links" being reported are very powerful or important. Some people claim that, since PageRank is recursive, you don't want to cut off paths, but when the paths are deep I've rarely seen any evidence to support this. A big, bloated index full of thin content, especially content available on other sites, is a much bigger danger.
I would not recommend using both a NOINDEX and a rel=canonical on these pages. It's a mixed signal, and that can cause Google to ignore one or both signals (and at their choosing, not yours). I think NOINDEX is fine here. I've built structures like this for things like event websites (where we index the main event but NOINDEX all of the cities/dates, because they change so often) and have never seen any major issues. Actually, in one notable case, even before Panda came along, the site's rankings improved measurably.
-
Hi Pete! Sorry about the delay.
The site is https://www.holidayhypermarket.co.uk/, and the non-indexed pages are products such as:
These are noindexed as they tend to have syndicated content.
Thanks!
-
Blocked pages are generally not going to pass internal link equity, but the impact of this depends a lot on your site structure. If these were deep pages at the end of paths and your site nav covers major/ranking pages, it shouldn't matter too much. If these pages were in the middle of paths, you could be causing serious problems.
There's also the question of whether these pages themselves (the blocked ones) were getting inbound links or were themselves ranking for some of these terms.
Unfortunately, at this scope, it's really hard to speak in generalities. Can you give us a sense of what these pages are and why they were blocked? How large is the site overall?
-
Hi Sam,
If the pages that you are talking have been blocked by robots.txt I do not think they would be in any way beneficial. In our case (because of a development made back in 2009 - which still wasn't corrected) we have pages that are noindex, follow. And I have seen that some anchor texts used for internal linking still bring value to the landing pages.
I hope this helped, Keszi
-
Hi,
I can't say about any research has been done on this topic or not. First I would like to quote whatt moz says about internal linking "Internal links are most useful for establishing site architecture and spreading link juice (URLs are also essential)."
I would like to break into two parts
1> If page/pages linked from blocked pages it means crawler won't find linked pages because pages are blocked from robots.txt this hinders their ability to get pages listed in the search engines' indices. I presume these pages blocked in robots.txt before migration so this could not be reason
2> Link Juice won't flow because it is blocked & it is blocked earlier too (before migration) so this also could not be the reason.
*** During migration website does lose ranking if website does not properly redirected so please check whether you followed best practice for migration or not by checking below URL
http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos
Thanks
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
-
Is a page with links to all posts okay?
Hi folks. Instead of an archive page template in my theme (I have my reasons), I am thinking of simply typing the post title as and when I publish a post, and linking to the post from there. Any SEO issues that you can think of? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
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 -
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 -
Google indexing pages from chrome history ?
We have pages that are not linked from site yet they are indexed in Google. It could be possible if Google got these pages from browser. Does Google takes data from chrome?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Why are bit.ly links being indexed and ranked by Google?
I did a quick search for "site:bit.ly" and it returns more than 10 million results. Given that bit.ly links are 301 redirects, why are they being indexed in Google and ranked according to their destination? I'm working on a similar project to bit.ly and I want to make sure I don't run into the same problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDatSB1 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
How to properly link to products from category pages?
Hi All, We have an e-commerce website and the category pages are built so that there is a product image and below it there is the title. Both the image and the title are in a href (each on its own). I encountered the following unfinished discussion here at MOZ:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-optimize-achor-text-links-on-ecommerce-category-page#post-93758 The discussion states that its improper. The question is - if it is wrong then why? (maybe because Google will give its weight to the image anchor instead of the text anchor since it is higher in the page). The other question is how to resolve the matter?
Should I add nofollow to the image href? Thanks0 -
Disallowed Pages Still Showing Up in Google Index. What do we do?
We recently disallowed a wide variety of pages for www.udemy.com which we do not want google indexing (e.g., /tags or /lectures). Basically we don't want to spread our link juice around to all these pages that are never going to rank. We want to keep it focused on our core pages which are for our courses. We've added them as disallows in robots.txt, but after 2-3 weeks google is still showing them in it's index. When we lookup "site: udemy.com", for example, Google currently shows ~650,000 pages indexed... when really it should only be showing ~5,000 pages indexed. As another example, if you search for "site:udemy.com/tag", google shows 129,000 results. We've definitely added "/tag" into our robots.txt properly, so this should not be happening... Google showed be showing 0 results. Any ideas re: how we get Google to pay attention and re-index our site properly?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | udemy0