Index or No Index (Panda Issue)
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
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 check spam score and non indexed links
Hi I am working on a project in which I have a local services website <a target="_self">www.thepcrrg.com</a> I want to be sure its links are getting indexed or not. Please help me.
On-Page Optimization | | Jioiebytt2 -
My site takes a lot of time to index On SERP
Hello great Moz contributors, I'm working on a 4-months-old site https://www.voxlyrics.com/, which I didn't see improvement after the Google December core update. What I'm facing right now is that my newly published posts take a lot of time to index on Google search results and it affecting my performance. While my competitor's sites index in less than a minute. I could've used the Google index tool which they removed a few months ago assumed they bring the feature back. Meanwhile, my site passed web.dev test perfect what happens very rarely. Is there any other thing needed to be done so that my posts will be indexing in less than a minute? Any help will be appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | mmesoma0 -
Issues with Multiple H1 tags on homepage?
Hi folks, My homepage has 3 identical H1 tags due to the fact that I have had to create individual hero images (with headings) for desktop, tablet and mobile. I couldn't get my theme to display the layout in exactly the way I wanted on each device without doing a specific hero image and tag for each device type. Does this have a major impact on my SEO? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Veevlimike
Mike.0 -
Does Google avoid indexing pages that include registered trademark signs?
I am suspecting that Google often hesitates to index pages that have registered trademarks on them that are marked with a ®. For example EGOL® used in the title tag or in the tag at the top of the page. Registered trademarks are everywhere and most retail product pages contain at least one of them. However, most people use the registered trademark names as text in their writing without adding the registered trademark sign of ®. Have you experienced a problem getting such pages indexed or have you read any articles about how Google treats registered trademarks?
On-Page Optimization | | EGOL0 -
Does hover over content index well
i notice increasing cases of portfolio style boxes on site designs (especially wordpress templates) where you have an image and text appears after hover over (sorry for my basic terminology). does this text which appears after hover over have much search engine value or as it doesnt immediately appear on pageload does it carry slightly less weight like tabbed content? any advice appreciated thanks neil
On-Page Optimization | | neilhenderson0 -
No index, or no index no follow?
Wondering if I could garner some views on this issue please. I'm about to add an affiliate store to a website I own, the site has a couple of pages of unique content (blogs, articles, advice etc on home improvement - all written by my team). Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store. Should I add a no index to the pages and allow the bots to still crawl them, or should I add no index and no follow? Ideally I would like to get the affiliate store category pages indexed as they will be a mixture of lots of different merchants and be fairly unique. Can Google still mark the site down for duplicate content if it can crawl it, even if it is noindex? Thanks, Carl
On-Page Optimization | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Modifying Well Established & Well Indexed Content
I have a page that is very well indexed and has a 1st position ranking in google. It is the best landing page in my site. That being said, it's several years old and I honestly think it could be better. The images could be enlarged, the the images could have fancy box enlargements instead of just linking out to flickr, there could be more content about follow up projects that people have done. I'm noteably nervous about changing such a clutch piece of content on my site. I do want to improve the content for users, not just make it more SEO friendly (it's already SEO'd), but I'm afraid that any change could cause a set back in ranking. Am I being afraid of nothing, should I just go for it and improve my content, or should I be extra cautious when editing well indexed content like this? Thanks for the advice
On-Page Optimization | | CPollock0 -
Time taken for inclusion in index
After a page is crawled, how much time does it take to be included in Google's index ? Immediately ? after few days ?
On-Page Optimization | | seoug_20050