Can I noindex most of my site?
-
A large number of the pages on my site are pages that contain things like photos and maps that are useful to my visitors, but would make poor landing pages and have very little written content. My site is huge. Would it be benificial to noindex all of these?
-
You have pretty much answered this question yourself by saying that the would make poor landing pages. If that is the case, and they are useful for site users, but not for search then, yeah, noindex them.
There is no need to nofollow those links either, you can if you want, but I don't see the point as the crawlers will hit your page, see the noindex tag and ignore it.
-
As these pages only have a sentence or two of unique content each (e.g. a photo caption), they are pretty much duplicate pages. This is why I think they might be harming my site after the UK Panda Update. I have now noindexed them all, but is it bad to have the majority of pages on your site as noindex? Should I also nofollow the links to them so that Google is less likely to see them?
I appreciate your help.
-
We had an SEO guru at our etailing meeting yesterday and he said the problem is DUPLICATE pages, not the number. He told a woman with 4000 pages not to worry about nofollows unless there were duplications.
-
There are definitely no links to those pages, so I have nothing to lose there.
-
Just a thought, but I'd make sure there aren't any incoming links to those pages. I don't know if google would see them on a nofollow page. And we know how much we love incoming links1
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
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Site not getting indexed by googlebot.
The following question is in regards to http://footeschool.org/. This site is not getting indexed with google(googlebot) This only happens when the user agent is set googlebot. This is a recent issue. We are using DNN as CMS. Are there any suggestion to help resolve this issue?
Technical SEO | | bcmull0 -
Https Cached Site
Hi there, I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout. Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore? Thanks! Bianca
Technical SEO | | TheBatesMillStore0 -
How can I block incoming links from a bad web site ?
Hello all, We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site. I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool. Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method? Would appreciate anyone's immediate response. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
What steps can you take to help a site that does not change
Hi, i am working on a product and services website www.clairehegarty.co.uk but the problem i have is, the site does not really change. The home page stays the same and the only time it changes is when a new course is advertised. The most important page on the website is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy but we have seen the site drop in rankings because the page is not being updated. This page has all the information you could want on weight loss but we have seen the page drop from number one in google to number four. I would like to know what steps we should take to increase our rankings in google and would be grateful for your suggestions. If i put in articles on the site, had a section where we put a new article every week, would this then get google to visit the whole site more and move our pages back up the rankings, or should we be looking at doing other things.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
On-site adjustment opinions
Hi folks, I've got a fairly interesting scenario. I'm trying to rank this page (http://www.staysa.co.za/sa/1-2-0-0-1/East-London/accommodation) better for the term, "accommodation east london". The client isn't keen on making many changes and it was built horribly with ASP, half CMS, half not. I have made the following changes today: I introduced two paragraphs of text below the H1 tag. I changed "East London Bed and Breakfast", "East London Conference Venues", "East London Cottage / Chalet" to just "Bed and Breakfast", "Conference Venues", "Cottage / Chalet" as the continual key phrase duplication in my experience is a bad move. I've made a change to the title tag (this is a huge mission as it's not CMS controlled, so I had to teach myself some basic ASP to do so). Meta data.. nightmare to change unfortunately, at least not without rewriting part of the CMS. I'm wondering, are there any other on-site factors that I'm missing? I'm not a fan of site-wide links, so I don't want to put an exact match anchor text link from the sidebar/footer to the page, not unless someone can motivate why I should. Keen to hear everyone's opinions 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of a site migration, and are at the final stage of testing redirects etc. However, to our horror we've just discovered Google has started indexing the new site. Any ideas on how this could have happened? I have most recently asked for robots.txt to exclude anything with a certain parameter in URL. Is there a chance this, wrongly implemented, could have caused this?
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Site forwarding - seo friendly or not?
Recently i decided to change my domain name - and although i have written several useful and working .htacess files with 301 redirects, this one became more complicated by the fact that I went through TWO domain name changes, before settling on the second one. Having seen some issues with the browser not being able to interpret correctly the .htaccess file, i temporarily suspended the .htaccess file, and opted instead for site forwarding. I don't know the mechanics behind site forwarding, or whether it is seo friendly or just a method for ip addressing, a sort of pseudo domain name server record change.
Technical SEO | | highersourcesites
I let it lie for a few weeks, until the dust settled, and yesterday put back the basic .htaccess file, with a 301 redirect, which directs the original domain name to be forwarded to the new one ( also it has a conditional in place to solve canonical issues). It works fine. But right now i am not seeing the link juice, the domain age, the domain page rank that it has. It has gone to zero, when it used to be three, sometimes four. I also made the change of address using webmaster tools. How long ( forever?) will it take to see my old page rank come back, even if it loses 10% from the change? And does site forwarding help or hinder seo ranking?0