Index or No Index (Panda Issue)

[dustyabe]

Hi,

I believe our website has been penalized by the panda update. We have over 9000 pages and we are currently indexing around 4,000 of those pages. I believe that more than half of the pages indexes have either thin content. Should we stop indexing those pages until we have quality page content? That will leave us with very few pages being indexed by Google (Roughly 1,000 of our 9,000 pages have quality content). I am worried that we would hurt our organic traffic more by not indexing the pages than by indexing the pages for google to read. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jim Rodriguez

[Carson-Ward]

Firstly, please don't assume that you've been hit by Panda. Find out. Indexation count is generally not a good basis for assuming a penalty.

• Was there a traffic drop around the date of a known Panda update? Check this list. https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change . If the date of traffic drop lines up, you might have a problem. Otherwise it could easily be something else.
• How many links does your site have? Google indexes and crawls based on your authority. It's one area where it doesn't really matter where the links go: just having more links seems to increase the amount your site is crawled. Obviously the links should be non-spammy.
• Do you have a site map? Are you linking to all of these pages? It could be an architecture issue unrelated to penalty.

If it is a Panda issue: generally I think people take the wrong approach to Panda. It's NOT a matter of page count. I run sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs indexed, useful pages with relatively few links and no problems. It's a matter of usefulness. So you can decrease your Panda risk by cutting out useless pages - or you can increase the usefulness of those pages.

When consulting I had good luck helping people recover from penalties, and with Panda I'd go through a whole process of figuring out what the user wanted (surveys, interviews, user testing, click maps, etc.), looking at what the competition was doing through that lens, and then re-ordering pages, adjusting layout, adding content, and improving functionality toward that end.

Hope that helps.

[Xtend-Life]

Every case is different, what might work for someone else may not work for you. This depends on the content you are saying is thin - unless it has caused a penalty, I would leave it indexed and focus on writing more quality content.

[rootwaysinc]

I think it is a critical issue - you have thin content on your most of the pages; If google bot can access your thin content pages, you may not recover from panda until you add quality content on your all the pages and that pages indexed by google (it may take a very long time)

If you have added noindex (just you told Google that do not index pages), still Google can access your pages so, google can still read your thin content and you can not recover any how.

so as per my advice you need to either remove all thin content from your pages and add quality content as fast as you can and tell google to indexed your new content (using fetch option in Google search console) (recommended) or add nofollow and noindex both to the thin content pages (not recommended) because you may lose huge number of traffic and  (may you can't recover from panda - i am not sure for this statement).

[grasshopper]

Hi Jim,

From my own experience with Panda-impacted sites, I've seen good results from applying meta robots "noindex" to URLs with thin content.  The trick is finding the right pages to noindex.  Be diligent in your analytics up front!

We had a large site (~800K URLs), with a large amount of content we suspected would look "thin" to Panda (~30%).  We applied the noindex to pages that didn't meet our threshold value for content, and watched the traffic slowly drop as Google re-crawled the pages and honored the noindex.

It turned out that our analytics on the front end hadn't recognized just how much long-tail traffic the noindexed URLs were getting.  We lost too much traffic.  After about 3 weeks, we essentially reset the noindex threshold to get some of those pages back earning some traffic, which had a meaningful impact on our monetization.

So my recommendation is to do rigorous web analytics up front, decide how much traffic you can afford to lose (you will lose some) and begin the process of setting your thresholds for noindex.  It takes a few tries.

Especially if you value the earning potential of your site over the long term, I would be much more inclined to noindex deeply up front.  As long as your business can survive on the traffic generated by those 1000 pages, noindex the rest, and begin a long-term plan for improving content on the other 8000 pages.