What is the best way to deal with pages whose content changes?
-
My site features businesses that offers activities for kids. Each business has its own page on my site. Business pages contains a listing of different activities that organization is putting on (such as events, summer camps, drop-in activities). Some businesses only offer seasonal activities (for example, during Christmas break and summer camps). The rest of the year, the business has no activities -- the page is empty.
This is creating 2 problems. It's poor user experience (which I can fix no problem) but it also is thin content and sometimes treated as duplicate content.
What's the best way to deal with pages whose content can be quite extensive at certain points of the year and shallow or empty at other parts? Should I include a meta ROBOTS tag to not index when there is no content, and change the tag to index when there is content? Should I just ignore this problem? Should I remove the page completely and do a redirect?
Would love to know people's thoughts.
-
Excellent. That's what we'll probably end up doing. Egol and Alex, thanks for the responses.
-
You could have something about the success of past events? Maybe you could encourage the businesses to write something themselves as good promotion.
How about some permanent text about the business and/or events they run on the page? If there are no events - perhaps a brief explanation that there are none yet, along with some suggestions of other local businesses running events and/or a call-to-action to sign up for notifications?
I wouldn't noindex the page when there is no content.
-
Hey thanks for the reply. I should clarify that the listing page is just that -- a listing of upcoming events. A separate page features information about the business. The listings are database driven. Here is an example...
http://www.chatterblock.com/facility/13/juan-de-fuca-recreation-centre-victoria-bc/events/
-
If you write the content for these pages, get busy writing more.
If the featured businesses write the content you will need to find carrots, sticks or pink slips.
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
-
Page content not being recognised?
I moved my website from Wix to Wordpress in May 2018. Since then, it's disappeared from Google searches. The site and pages are indexed, but no longer ranking. I've just started a Moz campaign, and most pages are being flagged as having "thin content" (50 words or less), when I know that there are 300+ words on most of the pages. Looking at the page source I find this bit of code: page contents Does this mean that Google is finding this and thinks that I have only two words (page contents) on the page? Or is this code to grab the page contents from somewhere else in the code? I'm completely lost with this and would appreciate any insight.
Technical SEO | | Photowife1 -
Best Way to Break Down Paginated Content?
(Sorry for my english) I have lots of user reviews on my website and in some cases, there are more than a thousand reviews for a single product/service. I am looking for the best way to break down these reviews in several sub-pages. Here are the options I thought of: 1. Break down reviews into multiple pages / URL http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page1
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page2
etc... In this case, each page would be indexed by search engines. Pros: all the reviews are getting indexed Cons: It will be harder to rank for "blue widget review" as their will be many similar pages 2. Break down reviews into multiple pages / URL with noindex + canonical tag http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page1
http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page2
etc... In this case, each page would be set to noindex and the canonical tag would point to the first review page. Pros: only one URL can potentially rank for "blue widget review" Cons: Subpages are not indexed 3. Load all the reviews into one page and handle pagination using Javascript reviews, reviews, reviews
more reviews, more reviews, more reviews
etc... Each page would be loaded in a different which would be shown or hidden using Javascript when browsing through the pages. Could that be considered as cloaking?!? Pros: all the reviews are getting indexed Cons: large page size (kb) - maybe too large for search engines? 4. Load only the first page and load sub-pages dynamically using AJAX Display only the first review page on initial load. I would use AJAX to load additional reviews into the . It would be similar to some blog commenting systems where you have to click on "Load more comments" to see all the comments. Pros: Fast initial loading time + faster loading time for subpages = better user experience Cons: Only the first review page is indexed by search engines ========================================================= My main competitor who's achieving great rankings (no black hat of course) is using technique #3. What's your opinion?0 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
Avoiding duplicate content on internal pages
Lets say I'm working on a decorators website and they offer a list of residential and commercial services, some of which fall into both categories. For example "Internal Decorating" would have a page under both Residential and Commercial, and probably even a 3rd general category of Services too. The content inside the multiple instances of a given page (i.e. Internal Decorating) at best is going to be very similar if not identical in some instances. I'm just a bit concerned that having 3 "Internal Decorating" pages could be detrimental to the website's overall SEO?
Technical SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Best way to do a site in various regions
I have a client who has 2 primary services in 4 regions He does mold removal and water damage repair. He then serves cincinnati, dayton, columbus, and indianapolis. Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way. However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way. First of all what is the best site approach for this. He wants a site for each service and for each city. indy mold cincy mold dayton mold dayton water etc etc etc In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions. I feel like this is not the right way to handle this as he also has another site that is more generic To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city. The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions. He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized? Thanks
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
Paging Links Code - Best Way?
Currently we are using previous 1 2 3 next for our link to other inventory pages, with some variation of this javascript code javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$phMain$dlPagesTop$ctl01$lnkPageTop','') . Can search engines even index the other pages with this javascript? Is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Duplicate Page Content Lists the same page twice?
When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content. It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this. It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here? Why does it have http;// twice? Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | eidna220